Filesystem tar pit

Filesystem tar pit

Posted Mar 6, 2007 12:46 UTC (Tue) by appie (subscriber, #34002)
Parent article: Avoiding the tar pit

I'm surprised Microsoft didn't replace their WinFS RDBMS based overdone concept with something equally 'new' but far less bloated: making use of file metadata to store tags and redefine the access to data (i.e. files) by storing and selecting a description of the data (i.e. tags) instead of the really, really, tired old concept of directories and files.

This is an area where FOSS could showcase an innovative approach.
Full text indexing like Spotlight is nice, but I have a sneaky suspicion it doesn't scale. Plus it isn't exactly user supplied meta data.

I hope a team of FOSS developers picks up the idea of using meta data in the various Linux filesystems to store tags and then come up with KDE and Gnome interfaces to store/select these tags.

I think it's far more intuitive to describe your data and make it possible for different users to describe the same data in their own individual tastes.
After all, creating a directory tree and coming up with a filename is a way of describing your data as well.
And instead of deleting/moving your data: tag the tags ("meta-tags").

I could go on and on, but i'll stop here.
Maybe someone can donate me another 8 hours a day, I could start working on it :)

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