4 ms·
> You need a hierarchy to manage a file system. I find this a strange assertion after several paragraphs which vociferously assert hierarchies are redundant in
by hydrox24 8y ago
> You need a hierarchy to manage a file system.
I find this a strange assertion after several paragraphs which vociferously assert hierarchies are redundant in the virtual space. In fact, OS/400 is a 'single-level' store using objects, so it has even been shown in practice that you do not need filesystems to build a useful OS, if I am not mistaken.
Am I mistaken?
- 1wd 8y agoI also found this assertion surprising. I often wish filesystems had good native support for tagging and not just a strict hierarchy. Even hardlinks / symlinks seem like a poorly supported afterthought, especially on Windows, and generally not worth the effort to use them for user-level data organisation. But I'm not sure how a purely tag based would work in practice, so thanks for the pointer to OS/400. Another example is the Windows Start Menu. The hierarchy is basically useless and a huge pain to use. I have give up on maintaining a sensible hierarchy long ago. Windows 10's search is much better, except when it fails you're forced to go back to the hierarchy. One thing missing here is that you can't navigate from a search result to the hierarchy.