3 ms·
I totally agree with this article - I've made similar points myself. I would also add, that how terrible is it if you have a file that applies to 2 or more are
by verisimi 5y ago
I totally agree with this article - I've made similar points myself.
I would also add, that how terrible is it if you have a file that applies to 2 or more areas, areas that you distinguish by folders? Eg say its a photo - you might want to have a 'family occasions' and '2019' folder - ie one photo might apply to 2 areas that you want to distinguish. Well, that level of organisation is effectively punished - you can either duplicate the photo in 2 places, or lose the reference in one. If you improve the photo using say, photoshop in one place, you better remember that you have a copy and remember to copy it over there too!
For me file systems were designed wrongly. For personal files there is the data and the meta-data. But the only meta-data we can add is in the file attributes.
Data should go into a 'bucket' and be stored by the OS somewhere, never duplicated. Meta-data relating to the file should describe features of the data, where to get it (perhaps in multiple places). It should be possible to apply multiple labels to it too, in my example 'family occasions' and '2019'.
- _glass 5y agofor this you have links, i.e. ln https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ln_(Unix) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ln_(Unix)
- verisimi 5y agoI know about links, and there are one or 2 other solutions I've looked at 2. But that's not really what I'm getting at. Links are pretty cumbersome, get broken, etc. They sort of work in the avoiding the duplication issue I mentioned. They don't work in the sense that what the (non-techy) user wants to do with data is an afterthought - ie the order of priority is computer, then user. What I'm talking about is that the meta-data describing personal files should be where the user adds their value to - they should be able to describe what the data means to them and that should only need to be done once. The data itself should be handled by the OS; where it is etc is not really a big concern for the user themselves.
- anonymoushn 5y agoThis doesn't seem great. Soft links are not resilient to renames or removals of the "canonical tag". Hard links are not resilient to improving the file in photoshop.