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Even now over 20 years later we still haven't had anything near as cool as BeFS. Who needs an email client when the file system can literally index it all and y

Even now over 20 years later we still haven't had anything near as cool as BeFS. Who needs an email client when the file system can literally index it all and your inbox and email messages are literally files in a folder in a Tracker window that's just displaying email specific metadata for its columns.

helf 4y ago
BeFS is one of the things I miss the most. My dream is an unholy merger of ZFS and BeFS.
xnx 4y ago
I think WinFS was trying to copy some of the good ideas, but it was abandoned https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinFS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinFS
naikrovek 4y ago
multiple comments about BeFS and none describe why it is so good.
- tialaramex 4y ago
  BeFS has file attributes (so you can say this file is an email I received, add from="Bob Smith <b.smith@example.com>", received="2022-11-15") and it can optionally but by default index all these attributes using an on-disk BTree. Many modern systems do have file attributes, although they're not always as capable as the ones in BeFS, and none of them to my knowledge chose to add all these BTrees because keeping them up-to-date is expensive.
  - p_l 4y ago
    NTFS provides on-disk indexes, that's where Windows Search stores its data... and how directories work in NTFS. Similar features can be handled in ZFS (the biggest issue is that IIRC its large K/V structure is AVL Tree, so you'd probably need to add a new object at ZPL layer). What is the big difference is that BeFS exposed the extended attributes easily in the file manager and APIs - compare it with other systems where the APIs were little known or not used - POSIX extended attributes which are very limited (4k), Solaris extended attributes (which let you open a file as a directory) but are Solaris only, WinNT which had the issue of WinNT being a niche among windows systems, etc. etc. BeOS in comparison required at least considerable porting work, at worst writing from scratch, and that meant the new features were much more visible.
  - _chu1 4y ago
    hey that's me! hope you received that email
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
tialaramex 4y ago
> Who needs an email client when the file system can literally index it all and your inbox and email messages are literally files in a folder in a Tracker window that's just displaying email specific metadata for its columns. As it soon turned out, almost everybody. All that BeFS does, in exchange for a bunch of your disk space and CPU, is BTree indexes, for each index you want your filesystem gets a little slower and bigger. It starts out "Quite a bit worse than some of the alternatives available at the time" and goes down from there. If you switch the indexing off so as to get back reasonable performance, now your email folders are just unsorted and sorting them takes forever as it would on a Windows PC (except your Windows PC has an email client so you wouldn't do that). This makes for a cool demo of course, which is important if your actual goal is to get Apple to hire you instead of Jobs, but there's a reason why your filesystem did not add this fairly simple feature and you still have an email client.
- anentropic 4y ago
  Naive question... if your email client would have to do that anyway, in exchange for a bunch of your disk space and CPU, does moving that responsibility to the OS make a net difference? Is it that BeFS was indexing everything and not just the folders that needed to be indexed? macos spotlight is also routinely indexing the file system, doesn't seem so different to me, naively
  - tialaramex 4y ago
    I believe Spotlight has a full text search, which is a pretty major improvement, at of course a considerable price. Feels like a reasonable choice for My Novel/ and not a sane choice for Movie Downloads/ (unless maybe Spotlight can read subtitles???) Also, an actual email client can specialise. BeFS is very general, the attributes can be typed but there's only one string type (other types include 32-bit and 64-bit integers, floats) so a Subject and a Sender email address both get indexed the same way. An email client might reasonably optimise for @corp.example type address searches for example, but then also do some simple keyword optimisations for subject line too. You could not turn off indexing for some/ all folders in BeOS only for an entire filesystem (and if you do a bunch of stuff doesn't work)
guenthert 4y ago
> Who needs an email client when the file system can literally index it all and your inbox and email messages are literally files in a folder in a Tracker window that's just displaying email specific metadata for its columns. Everyone who uses more than one device to access his/her e-mail? Sure BeOS had nice features, but it seems to me that it solved the wrong problems.
- ajsalminen 4y ago
  Using this doesn't prevent you from using another email client to access the inbox too. It is true you don't get the same view to your data on all clients/platforms but then again this is usually true to a large extent always when using multiple generic email clients to access the same inbox.
Shared404 4y ago
Not super familiar with BeFS, but this sounds kind of like Plan9? 9front may be up your alley: https://9front.org/ https://9front.org/

helf 4y ago

BeFS is one of the things I miss the most. My dream is an unholy merger of ZFS and BeFS.

xnx 4y ago

I think WinFS was trying to copy some of the good ideas, but it was abandoned https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinFS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinFS

naikrovek 4y ago

multiple comments about BeFS and none describe why it is so good.

tialaramex 4y ago
BeFS has file attributes (so you can say this file is an email I received, add from="Bob Smith <b.smith@example.com>", received="2022-11-15") and it can optionally but by default index all these attributes using an on-disk BTree. Many modern systems do have file attributes, although they're not always as capable as the ones in BeFS, and none of them to my knowledge chose to add all these BTrees because keeping them up-to-date is expensive.
- p_l 4y ago
  NTFS provides on-disk indexes, that's where Windows Search stores its data... and how directories work in NTFS. Similar features can be handled in ZFS (the biggest issue is that IIRC its large K/V structure is AVL Tree, so you'd probably need to add a new object at ZPL layer). What is the big difference is that BeFS exposed the extended attributes easily in the file manager and APIs - compare it with other systems where the APIs were little known or not used - POSIX extended attributes which are very limited (4k), Solaris extended attributes (which let you open a file as a directory) but are Solaris only, WinNT which had the issue of WinNT being a niche among windows systems, etc. etc. BeOS in comparison required at least considerable porting work, at worst writing from scratch, and that meant the new features were much more visible.
- _chu1 4y ago
  hey that's me! hope you received that email
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

tialaramex 4y ago

> Who needs an email client when the file system can literally index it all and your inbox and email messages are literally files in a folder in a Tracker window that's just displaying email specific metadata for its columns. As it soon turned out, almost everybody. All that BeFS does, in exchange for a bunch of your disk space and CPU, is BTree indexes, for each index you want your filesystem gets a little slower and bigger. It starts out "Quite a bit worse than some of the alternatives available at the time" and goes down from there. If you switch the indexing off so as to get back reasonable performance, now your email folders are just unsorted and sorting them takes forever as it would on a Windows PC (except your Windows PC has an email client so you wouldn't do that). This makes for a cool demo of course, which is important if your actual goal is to get Apple to hire you instead of Jobs, but there's a reason why your filesystem did not add this fairly simple feature and you still have an email client.

anentropic 4y ago
Naive question... if your email client would have to do that anyway, in exchange for a bunch of your disk space and CPU, does moving that responsibility to the OS make a net difference? Is it that BeFS was indexing everything and not just the folders that needed to be indexed? macos spotlight is also routinely indexing the file system, doesn't seem so different to me, naively
- tialaramex 4y ago
  I believe Spotlight has a full text search, which is a pretty major improvement, at of course a considerable price. Feels like a reasonable choice for My Novel/ and not a sane choice for Movie Downloads/ (unless maybe Spotlight can read subtitles???) Also, an actual email client can specialise. BeFS is very general, the attributes can be typed but there's only one string type (other types include 32-bit and 64-bit integers, floats) so a Subject and a Sender email address both get indexed the same way. An email client might reasonably optimise for @corp.example type address searches for example, but then also do some simple keyword optimisations for subject line too. You could not turn off indexing for some/ all folders in BeOS only for an entire filesystem (and if you do a bunch of stuff doesn't work)

guenthert 4y ago

> Who needs an email client when the file system can literally index it all and your inbox and email messages are literally files in a folder in a Tracker window that's just displaying email specific metadata for its columns. Everyone who uses more than one device to access his/her e-mail? Sure BeOS had nice features, but it seems to me that it solved the wrong problems.

ajsalminen 4y ago
Using this doesn't prevent you from using another email client to access the inbox too. It is true you don't get the same view to your data on all clients/platforms but then again this is usually true to a large extent always when using multiple generic email clients to access the same inbox.

Shared404 4y ago

Not super familiar with BeFS, but this sounds kind of like Plan9? 9front may be up your alley: https://9front.org/ https://9front.org/