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> When people realize they need to classify a file in more than one way, they will start to use shortcuts/links to try to solve the problem. (Windows has shortc

by flukus 9y ago

> When people realize they need to classify a file in more than one way, they will start to use shortcuts/links to try to solve the problem. (Windows has shortcuts, Unix has soft/symbolic links, and Mac has aliases. This is a ubiquitous feature, but transferring shortcuts across existing platforms is very hard.) This sounds like a reasonable solution, but will face trouble in all but the simplest use cases. They rule out this solution because it's not perfect, but surely if the idea had real merit this would be a serviceable test bed? I think we have hierarchies because it's human nature to create hierarchies to make sense of the world, we try to force them into place where they don't make sense. We see it in biology, we see it in organisations and we see it in code, I'm sure most of us here have worked with examples of OO hierarchies that made no sense.

nayuki 9y ago
Hi. Have you tried managing a collection of shortcuts? How do you deal with recategorization, removing files, renaming files, moving files to different storage devices, etc.? The article has a whole section illustrating why both hardlinks and softlinks won't work in the general case. https://www.nayuki.io/page/designing-better-file-organization-around-tags-not-hierarchies#hard-and-soft-links-as-non-solutions https://www.nayuki.io/page/designing-better-file-organizatio...
- flukus 9y ago
  > The article has a whole section illustrating why both hardlinks and softlinks won't work in the general case. Yes, that's the part I quoted. > Have you tried managing a collection of shortcuts? No, tagging is the bottleneck for me, which is why I don't think it will ever be useful. > How do you deal with recategorization, removing files, renaming files, moving files to different storage devices, etc.? Aside from moving to different storage device, you can make a minimum viable product with a few shell scripts, one to tag a file, one to untag, one to search by tag(s), one to listen for for events (move, delete). For bonus points you could do some auto tagging from meta data. A working implementation (even with limitations) would be a lot more convincing than all this theory.

by flukus 9y ago

nayuki 9y ago

Hi. Have you tried managing a collection of shortcuts? How do you deal with recategorization, removing files, renaming files, moving files to different storage devices, etc.? The article has a whole section illustrating why both hardlinks and softlinks won't work in the general case. https://www.nayuki.io/page/designing-better-file-organization-around-tags-not-hierarchies#hard-and-soft-links-as-non-solutions https://www.nayuki.io/page/designing-better-file-organizatio...

flukus 9y ago
> The article has a whole section illustrating why both hardlinks and softlinks won't work in the general case. Yes, that's the part I quoted. > Have you tried managing a collection of shortcuts? No, tagging is the bottleneck for me, which is why I don't think it will ever be useful. > How do you deal with recategorization, removing files, renaming files, moving files to different storage devices, etc.? Aside from moving to different storage device, you can make a minimum viable product with a few shell scripts, one to tag a file, one to untag, one to search by tag(s), one to listen for for events (move, delete). For bonus points you could do some auto tagging from meta data. A working implementation (even with limitations) would be a lot more convincing than all this theory.