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Nothing stops you from encoding your human-labels as bytestrings. Most fellow humans do exactly that. "Gosh I wish the relation between this file's human-label

by Wicher 4y ago

Nothing stops you from encoding your human-labels as bytestrings. Most fellow humans do exactly that. "Gosh I wish the relation between this file's human-label and its filesystem-identity were something other than bijective", said no Linux user ever. A filename is an identity and if identities are ambiguous, you run into trouble, examples in this thread abound. Putting it another way, do you work with relational databases? Primary keys? Those are identities. I don't even want to think about a world in which I can't roundtrip data through a database and have things NOT come out the way I put them in. "Human labels" or not ;-) Of course it's fine to search for things case-insensitively or otherwise normalized. And so we have "find -iname" and "locate -i" etc. etc. That's totally reasonable.

kalleboo 4y ago
Personally I loved how Classic MacOS stored all it's file references as an "alias" data type which used the equivalent of inode, going as far as encoding file server connection details for auto-reconnect and a fallback path of inodes and names to traverse in case the file was removed and replaced. But that worked in an OS that had no command line - UNIX users are allergic to binary configuration formats and demand to be able to type path names.
eviks 4y ago
> Nothing stops you from encoding your human-labels as bytestrings The fact that inhuman labels can sneak in stops me > said no Linux user ever You just weren't listening > you run into trouble, examples in this thread abound Bag of bytes approach is not trouble free > Primary keys? Do those accept any bytes in a bag? > can't roundtrip data through a database and have things NOT come out the way I put them in So you just want normalisation-preserving filesystem? But I see that you care so little about human users that you think they should learn to avoid Á outside of letters to grandma...
- Wicher 4y ago
  > The fact that inhuman labels can sneak in stops me Stops you from what? I'm not sure what you mean there. No one mentioned inhuman. Someone, not me, instantiated a "labels for humans" concept and I roll with that, for the sake of conversation. >> Primary keys? > Do those accept any bytes in a bag? Well, a "bag" (unordered) would not be the right term, but we understand what the original author meant (a bytestring), so: Yes, in fact they do. For instance, PostgreSQL: create table bla (joyfulkey bytea PRIMARY KEY) We don't want identifiers mangled. Should you be so unfortunate to have to use bytestrings as primary keys, then they'll come out the way you put them in. Because they're unambiguous identifiers. Not prose. > So you just want normalisation-preserving filesystem? I want an identity-preserving filesystem. And I have it! > But I see that you care so little about human users that you think they should learn to avoid Á outside of letters to grandma... I care a lot about human users. I give them nice file pickers so that they can easily choose to open files named ÁÁÁ.docx. Or search for those, using a system where both query and index is normalized (as is the common approach). And the other kind of users, also human, who find they care about the identity of files since they're writing that search engine and have to pass them in an argument vector to get the PDF viewer to open the file that the user found, will be most happy if they don't need to worry about the file system second-guessing them on identities. PS There's a lot of you-this you-that ad-hominem things in your comments. That's not really the best way to hold a discussion.

by Wicher 4y ago

kalleboo 4y ago

Personally I loved how Classic MacOS stored all it's file references as an "alias" data type which used the equivalent of inode, going as far as encoding file server connection details for auto-reconnect and a fallback path of inodes and names to traverse in case the file was removed and replaced. But that worked in an OS that had no command line - UNIX users are allergic to binary configuration formats and demand to be able to type path names.

eviks 4y ago

> Nothing stops you from encoding your human-labels as bytestrings The fact that inhuman labels can sneak in stops me > said no Linux user ever You just weren't listening > you run into trouble, examples in this thread abound Bag of bytes approach is not trouble free > Primary keys? Do those accept any bytes in a bag? > can't roundtrip data through a database and have things NOT come out the way I put them in So you just want normalisation-preserving filesystem? But I see that you care so little about human users that you think they should learn to avoid Á outside of letters to grandma...

Wicher 4y ago
> The fact that inhuman labels can sneak in stops me Stops you from what? I'm not sure what you mean there. No one mentioned inhuman. Someone, not me, instantiated a "labels for humans" concept and I roll with that, for the sake of conversation. >> Primary keys? > Do those accept any bytes in a bag? Well, a "bag" (unordered) would not be the right term, but we understand what the original author meant (a bytestring), so: Yes, in fact they do. For instance, PostgreSQL: create table bla (joyfulkey bytea PRIMARY KEY) We don't want identifiers mangled. Should you be so unfortunate to have to use bytestrings as primary keys, then they'll come out the way you put them in. Because they're unambiguous identifiers. Not prose. > So you just want normalisation-preserving filesystem? I want an identity-preserving filesystem. And I have it! > But I see that you care so little about human users that you think they should learn to avoid Á outside of letters to grandma... I care a lot about human users. I give them nice file pickers so that they can easily choose to open files named ÁÁÁ.docx. Or search for those, using a system where both query and index is normalized (as is the common approach). And the other kind of users, also human, who find they care about the identity of files since they're writing that search engine and have to pass them in an argument vector to get the PDF viewer to open the file that the user found, will be most happy if they don't need to worry about the file system second-guessing them on identities. PS There's a lot of you-this you-that ad-hominem things in your comments. That's not really the best way to hold a discussion.