3 ms·
What's old is new again... I'm sure other filesystems reflected this no-visible-filesystem OS mentality, but BFS of BeOS was the earliest one I recall (http://
by CoffeeDregs 15y ago
What's old is new again... I'm sure other filesystems reflected this no-visible-filesystem OS mentality, but BFS of BeOS was the earliest one I recall (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Be_File_System http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Be_File_System) that had metadata, indexing and querying built into the filesystem itself. Apple seems to be making a push to bury the view of the filesystem.
While the quick-search functionality of modern OSs is awesome, being able to arrange things in a hierarchy in the filesystem is also very useful. I guess the OS could go in the direction of tagging, but that seems pretty messy (I'm frightened to think of what would happen to our consulting firm's neatly organized and huge DropBox).
- kabdib 15y agoDitto, the Apple Newton. Didn't have a file system, just a tagged and indexed object store. I'm not sure how well it scales. I do think that simple trees don't work well (and history argues for this: even early versions of Unix had links). A multigraph would be nice, though tough to delete from.
- jerf 15y agoMultigraphs exacerbate the problem, not solve it. Now, not only can Mom not understand directory hierarchies, your average computer programmer doesn't actually understand them either, even though he thinks he does. Most programmers do not actually understand graphs, or know safe ways to deal with them.... ... and in fact in many ways we already have multigraphs on filesystems, programmers already don't understand them nearly as well as they think they do, they are often nothing but trouble, and we don't see extensive use made of them in very "graphy" ways as a result.