On a related note, why a filesystem and not a database? I get the feeling that a filesystem ultimately is just a .. poor man's database. Except that it's quit

On a related note, why a filesystem and not a database? I get the feeling that a filesystem ultimately is just a .. poor man's database. Except that it's quite crappy and there are no proper transactions, many things are impossible without TOCTOUs, many a bug (including security ones) have been due to race conditions around filesystem operations. I guess path->{metadata,data} with no transactions is a simple abstraction, as with so many other simple abstractions, it just bites you when you try to build anything nontrivial. Then you need to switch to a real solution. Just as people sometimes start with a bunch of shell scripts before they recoil in horror and realize that they should've started with a real programming language.