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Funny that their paper is organized as a Hierarchical File System: 1 Introduction 2 The Hierarchical Namespace Albatross 2.1 Irrelevance
by zeynel1 16y ago
Funny that their paper is organized as a Hierarchical File System:
1 Introduction
2 The Hierarchical Namespace Albatross
2.1 Irrelevance
2.2 Restrictiveness
2.3 Performance Limiting
3 hFAD: A New File System Architecture
3.1 API
3.1.1 Naming Interfaces
3.1.2 Access Interfaces
3.2 Index Stores
3.3 OSD Layer
3.4 Implementation
4 Open Questions
5 Conclusions
- makmanalp 16y agoWell, they didn't say hierarchy was dead. Corporations, governments and militaries would beg to differ!
- cdavid 16y agoBut they are academics. As most people familiar with computers and their technical usage, I also tend to organize things in a hierarchical manner. But I cannot ignore that most people around me do not: they just put everything on desktop and one or two other folders.
- baddox 16y agoI keep things fairly well organized on my file server, but I've definitely encountered times where my folder hierarchy is insufficient. Wanting to get away from hierarchies isn't just for academics and the disorganized. Here's two examples: I naturally have a Movies directory and a TV directory. Under each I have two directories SD and HD. Sometimes I may want to simply browse all the HD video on my system. Where do music videos (i.e. live concerts) go? They're certainly Music, but it's fair to imagine wanting to see them listed when I'm browsing through Movies and not listed when I'm browsing my mp3's. Add in tutorial videos for music production software (I have a lot of these) and it's even more of a guessing game.
- jhrobert 16y agoIt would be cool to navigate by file type sometimes. ie: have some \sound\mp3\all "virtual directory" automatically populated will all the mp3 files of my system. Now that I think of it, it would be cool to be able to express such "virtual directories" by way of declarative filters. eg: mkdir ./bigfiles ./ -r 'file.size > 100mo, subdir by file.year/file.type, file.type isnt tmp' -- ..., you get the picture
- groby_b 16y agoIt's almost like "Smart Folders" in spotlight ;) (Yes, I get what you're saying - you want to impose a structure on that smart folder via the metadata. It was just too tempting to make a stupid comment ;)
- est 16y agoWell, that's because our reading habits are linear.
- fauigerzigerk 16y agoA paper is not a generic facility for data storage. Text meant for human reading is to some degree sequential. You cannot just change the order of words, paragraphs or sections in it. It would be a different text. But that doesn't mean files in a directory should have inherent order. Also, they say: "Note that we are not condemning hierarchy in general; indeed, hierarchy can be useful in a variety of situations. Rather, we are arguing against canonizing any particular hierarchy"