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Usefullness of this is highly content specific. It maybe works for mp3s or videos/photos you made yourself and contain some metadata. I can't imagine tag based
by megous 5y ago
Usefullness of this is highly content specific. It maybe works for mp3s or videos/photos you made yourself and contain some metadata. I can't imagine tag based organization of all the random 2 mil. files I have that don't fit into these neat categories.
I don't need access to most of these files unless I'm working on something relevant to them. When I work on X, I go to directory X and everything I need sits below X in some hierarchy. I'm never interested in anything that's below X unless I'm working on X. I don't want stuff from X to pollute some global namespace just because some mp3 or PDFs are present under X. That's true for hundreds of personal projects and tools I've made.
Directory hierarchy is a pretty neat abstraction to me and all the tools I use already support it well.
- Rygian 5y agoDoes it mean that you will store multiple copies of a file, if it ends up being useful for multiple projects? About the random 2 mil. files you have lying around, the tags you should set should describe not the files themselves, but the reason why you chose to keep those files.
- pgcj_poster 5y agoI have a similar system to GP, and the answer is yes: I will duplicate files that are relevant to multiple projects, with the exception of research papers, which all live together in Zotero.
- megous 5y agoYes. Pretty much. The reason why I'm chosing to store the files is the project they're part of. I don't need them otherwise. If the project is inactive or dead, I'll compress the folder into some archive and delete the folder. If something is meant to be useful for multiple projects it either gets symlinked, or put into its own project. Anyway, I'm not saying tagging as a primary categorization interface is not useful at all. It's just that it has limited applications where it would be definitely more useful than traditional filesystem hierarchy.
- geysersam 5y agoA tagging system seems to me to be a superset of the hierarchical model. Just tag the files '/projects/a/src/module/name/' etc. and perhaps another tag for file type, and the models are more or less the same.
- megous 5y agoHow's that more useful, though, if I'd just replicate hierarchy using tags, I can just as well continue using the traditional hierarchy?
- geysersam 5y agoHe makes a fairly comprehensive argument in the article ;) But sure I'll try to list some of the benefits mentioned. 1. Identity without names. Never any risk of overwriting files when renaming. Only explicit deletes. 2. A wider range of ways to model data. Including but not limited to a hierarchical approach. 3. No duplication of data. The same file can exist in multiple projects without coupling them or wasting space on the hard drive. ... All in all it seems quite a powerful idea. But I'm sure there are issues that would have to be solved for it to replace traditional file systems.