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What's wrong with the traditional folder full of symlinks? This article doesn't talk about symbolic links at all, and they would solve all the "problems" discus

What's wrong with the traditional folder full of symlinks? This article doesn't talk about symbolic links at all, and they would solve all the "problems" discussed here.

moe 17y ago
This article doesn't talk about symbolic links at all, and they would solve all the "problems" discussed here. The only problem symlinks can address would that of having files available under multiple locations. But that's still strictly hierarchical and bound to become a maintenance nightmare soon (just think about file renames). Tag based filesystems are indeed an interesting idea and a somewhat logical next step from the traditional hierarchical fs + desktop search tandem that is commonplace now.
- ThinkWriteMute 17y ago
  Never going to happen. Far too many people like the person you replied too are going to scream that we're just not using the regular tools 'right'.
  - TomasSedovic 17y ago
    True -- on the desktop. But most web-based storages are doing this already (gmail, flickr, delicious). I do believe that desktops will lose their significance over time and the web experience will be the next thing. And then it may even migrate to the OS itself, because it will be the familiar thing.
- thwarted 17y ago
  If you were going to do it like this, hard links would make a better option. And in a tag based file system, the actual on-filesystem "filename" isn't as important as the path, er list of tags. This would end up being a maintenance nightmare for different reason, though. You'd end up with two dirs, for example work/projectX and projectX/work, with some files in one and some files in another. Strict hierarchies don't map to tags.
- isb 17y ago
  A while back I wrote a Fuse filesystem for Mac (http://code.google.com/p/xtagfs/ http://code.google.com/p/xtagfs/) that does exactly what the blog proposes. The fs just provides the directory structure on top of an existing filesystem and the files are symlinks to the actual files on the filesystem.

What's wrong with the traditional folder full of symlinks? This article doesn't talk about symbolic links at all, and they would solve all the "problems" discussed here.

moe 17y ago

This article doesn't talk about symbolic links at all, and they would solve all the "problems" discussed here. The only problem symlinks can address would that of having files available under multiple locations. But that's still strictly hierarchical and bound to become a maintenance nightmare soon (just think about file renames). Tag based filesystems are indeed an interesting idea and a somewhat logical next step from the traditional hierarchical fs + desktop search tandem that is commonplace now.

ThinkWriteMute 17y ago
Never going to happen. Far too many people like the person you replied too are going to scream that we're just not using the regular tools 'right'.
- TomasSedovic 17y ago
  True -- on the desktop. But most web-based storages are doing this already (gmail, flickr, delicious). I do believe that desktops will lose their significance over time and the web experience will be the next thing. And then it may even migrate to the OS itself, because it will be the familiar thing.
thwarted 17y ago
If you were going to do it like this, hard links would make a better option. And in a tag based file system, the actual on-filesystem "filename" isn't as important as the path, er list of tags. This would end up being a maintenance nightmare for different reason, though. You'd end up with two dirs, for example work/projectX and projectX/work, with some files in one and some files in another. Strict hierarchies don't map to tags.
isb 17y ago
A while back I wrote a Fuse filesystem for Mac (http://code.google.com/p/xtagfs/ http://code.google.com/p/xtagfs/) that does exactly what the blog proposes. The fs just provides the directory structure on top of an existing filesystem and the files are symlinks to the actual files on the filesystem.