5 ms·

Yeah, it’s sort of funny how “POSIXish semantics” has become our definition of these things, when it’s just one kind of thing that’s been called a filesystem hi

Yeah, it’s sort of funny how “POSIXish semantics” has become our definition of these things, when it’s just one kind of thing that’s been called a filesystem historically.

mickael-kerjean 3y ago
Fun experiment I made with my mum, building a storage independent dropbox like UI [1] for anything that implement this interface: type IBackend interface { Ls(path string) ([]os.FileInfo, error) Cat(path string) (io.ReadCloser, error) Mkdir(path string) error Rm(path string) error Mv(from string, to string) error Save(path string, file io.Reader) error Touch(path string) error } My mum really couldn't care less about the posix semantic as soon as she can see the pictures of my kid which happen to be on S3 [1] https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash
- wwalexander 3y ago
  Reducing things to basically the interface you laid out is the point of 9p [1], and is what Plan 9’s UNIX-but-distributed design was built on top of. Same inventor as Go! If you haven’t dived down the Plan 9 rabbit hole yet, it’s a beautiful and haunting vision of how simple cloud computing could have been. [1] https://9fans.github.io/plan9port/man/man9/intro.html https://9fans.github.io/plan9port/man/man9/intro.html
- MrJohz 3y ago
  I think this interface is less interesting than the semantics behind it, particularly when it comes to concurrency: what happens when you delete a folder, and then try and create a file in that folder at the same time? What happens when you move a folder to a new location, and during that move, delete the new or old folders? Like yes, for your mum's use case, with a single user, it's probably not all that important that you cover those edge cases, but every time I've built pseudo-filesystems on top of non-filesystem storage APIs, those sorts of semantic questions have been where all the problems have hidden. It's not particularly hard to implement the interface you've described, but it's very hard to do it in such a way that, for example, you never have dangling files that exist but aren't contained in any folder, or that you never have multiple files with the same path, and so on.
  - mickael-kerjean 3y ago
    All those considerations are important when implementing the interface but the interface itself isn't invalidated by those concerns and can cope with those constraints fine.
DonHopkins 3y ago
Can S3 murder your wife like ReiserFS and Reiser4? https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Comparison_of_file_systems&oldid=209063556#Features https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Comparison_of_fil...

Yeah, it’s sort of funny how “POSIXish semantics” has become our definition of these things, when it’s just one kind of thing that’s been called a filesystem historically.

mickael-kerjean 3y ago

Fun experiment I made with my mum, building a storage independent dropbox like UI [1] for anything that implement this interface: type IBackend interface { Ls(path string) ([]os.FileInfo, error) Cat(path string) (io.ReadCloser, error) Mkdir(path string) error Rm(path string) error Mv(from string, to string) error Save(path string, file io.Reader) error Touch(path string) error } My mum really couldn't care less about the posix semantic as soon as she can see the pictures of my kid which happen to be on S3 [1] https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash

wwalexander 3y ago
Reducing things to basically the interface you laid out is the point of 9p [1], and is what Plan 9’s UNIX-but-distributed design was built on top of. Same inventor as Go! If you haven’t dived down the Plan 9 rabbit hole yet, it’s a beautiful and haunting vision of how simple cloud computing could have been. [1] https://9fans.github.io/plan9port/man/man9/intro.html https://9fans.github.io/plan9port/man/man9/intro.html
MrJohz 3y ago
I think this interface is less interesting than the semantics behind it, particularly when it comes to concurrency: what happens when you delete a folder, and then try and create a file in that folder at the same time? What happens when you move a folder to a new location, and during that move, delete the new or old folders? Like yes, for your mum's use case, with a single user, it's probably not all that important that you cover those edge cases, but every time I've built pseudo-filesystems on top of non-filesystem storage APIs, those sorts of semantic questions have been where all the problems have hidden. It's not particularly hard to implement the interface you've described, but it's very hard to do it in such a way that, for example, you never have dangling files that exist but aren't contained in any folder, or that you never have multiple files with the same path, and so on.
- mickael-kerjean 3y ago
  All those considerations are important when implementing the interface but the interface itself isn't invalidated by those concerns and can cope with those constraints fine.

DonHopkins 3y ago

Can S3 murder your wife like ReiserFS and Reiser4? https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Comparison_of_file_systems&oldid=209063556#Features https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Comparison_of_fil...