Shell and Zeitgeist: the future of GNOME?

Posted Apr 25, 2009 13:53 UTC (Sat) by ms (subscriber, #41272)
In reply to: Shell and Zeitgeist: the future of GNOME? by Los__D
Parent article: Shell and Zeitgeist: the future of GNOME?

I broadly agree. Filesystems should be databases, and it should be possible to create projections of the filesystem based on any metadata associated with files. Files should also be strongly typed. Ultimately, a "directory" is just a piece of meta data associated with a file.

However, I rather suspect that the Gnome Zeitgeist, by just adding "by date" projections is going to demonstrate that that's really not good enough.

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Shell and Zeitgeist: the future of GNOME?

Posted Apr 25, 2009 16:12 UTC (Sat) by seilo (guest, #55462) [Link] (6 responses)

We don't only add projections by date. That is why we provide tagging! So you can chose not to view by date but rather to view data related "by tags" to whatever you wish! You can also browse files that have a specific tag
or view files that have several tags in common!

Shell and Zeitgeist: the future of GNOME?

Posted Apr 25, 2009 18:39 UTC (Sat) by dirtyepic (guest, #30178) [Link] (5 responses)

I've never understood the appeal of tagging. How is going through all my files and adding the appropriate tags to each one any easier/faster/more convenient than just putting them in a folder in the first place? Sure you can have multiple tags per file, but every one of the very few times I've had to find files based on some kind of arbitrary metadata, it's something that I never thought to use as a tag (eg. i have photos tagged with location and date, but i need to find pictures of my brother).

i do see the value in social tagging where it's likely someone else has already done the dirty work, but for my own stuff? Never.

Shell and Zeitgeist: the future of GNOME?

Posted Apr 25, 2009 18:52 UTC (Sat) by ms (subscriber, #41272) [Link] (3 responses)

Yeah, if people can't be arsed to put they files in a sensible folder structure then they won't bother to richly tag them. All such meta data should ideally come from the file content itself. E.g. id3 tags, exif data etc etc. The ability to have live projection with many, often pretty complex constraints (i.e. you need a full expression engine in this, not just some "show me files tagged with 'red'" crap) is actually pretty cool.

Shell and Zeitgeist: the future of GNOME?

Posted Apr 25, 2009 22:07 UTC (Sat) by salimma (subscriber, #34460) [Link] (2 responses)

Pretty cool, and we'll finally be where BeOS was ten years ago.

Shell and Zeitgeist: the future of GNOME?

Posted Apr 30, 2009 18:47 UTC (Thu) by rfunk (subscriber, #4054) [Link] (1 responses)

And where OS X is today (with Spotlight and QuickSilver).

Shell and Zeitgeist: the future of GNOME?

Posted May 5, 2009 20:13 UTC (Tue) by salimma (subscriber, #34460) [Link]

You can do that with Beagle/Strigi/Tracker coupled with deskbar-applet/gnome-do/katapult already.

Shell and Zeitgeist: the future of GNOME?

Posted Jun 3, 2009 16:29 UTC (Wed) by renox (guest, #23785) [Link]

>>
How is going through all my files and adding the appropriate tags to each one any easier/faster/more convenient than just putting them in a folder in the first place?
<<
It's *exactly* the same work to put all your file in a folder or tagging the files: both are setting a metadata attribute on the files.

But hieararchical folders are more rigid and require an order even when there is no 'natural' order: ie /landscapes/NewYork isn't better than /NewYork/landscape..

So tags are more flexible.

Shell and Zeitgeist: the future of GNOME?

Posted Apr 27, 2009 12:48 UTC (Mon) by jzbiciak (guest, #5246) [Link] (6 responses)

Files should also be strongly typed.

Isn't that roughly the opposite of UNIX file philosophy? Even Apple's OS hasn't had strongly typed files for years.

Shell and Zeitgeist: the future of GNOME?

Posted Apr 27, 2009 19:33 UTC (Mon) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (5 responses)

Completely the opposite. You give me strongly typed files and I ask you to
do forensics, open a file in a wildly different app (there sometimes are
good reasons), or even run *backups* or use things like indexers.

Weakly typed files *are* a good idea: build it on top of libmagic.so (and,
for portability rather than speed, calls to file(1) if libmagic.so isn't
around).

Shell and Zeitgeist: the future of GNOME?

Posted Apr 27, 2009 21:30 UTC (Mon) by jzbiciak (guest, #5246) [Link] (4 responses)

I was just surprised nobody else jumped on that, since it seemed so un-UNIX.

(And un-everything these days, for that matter. I remember the Bad Old Days, when I couldn't open a file because it was the "wrong type." And that was on cassette!)

Shell and Zeitgeist: the future of GNOME?

Posted Apr 27, 2009 21:47 UTC (Mon) by ms (subscriber, #41272) [Link] (3 responses)

Nah, you misunderstand me. I don't care about changes to opening or manipulating file contents, this is all about the metadata associated with the file.

File types should form a hierarchy, so, eg ogg is subtype of music is a subtype of media is a subtype of file. And then the attributes a file carries is defined by the filetype, with inheritance. So, eg all files have a size, and then all media files have a length, and all ogg files have channel count, for example. This tends to keep the interfaces simpler, because it means you don't have to present the user with 7843264372 different attributes to constrain, it's very likely they know the file type they're expecting and so you obviously only offer the attributes that are defined for those file types.

Myself and a few friends actually implemented all this a few years ago, basically building the UI and everything on top of Postgresql. It worked tremendously well and was fantastically powerful. However, the issue, as it will always be, is making a sane bridge between such a rich and powerful system back to a normal file/directory system such that the command line works. We never really implemented it, though did have some ideas. As an indication of how powerful it all was, we never bothered adding "name" or "directory" attributes, which would, logically have been attached to the root file type. The meta data was so rich that you really didn't need to name files at all. I guess the obvious take away here is the age old adage of "a system is only as good as the data that's in it". In this case, it was excellent, but it could quickly deteriorate.

Shell and Zeitgeist: the future of GNOME?

Posted Apr 27, 2009 22:17 UTC (Mon) by jzbiciak (guest, #5246) [Link] (1 responses)

Ah, I see. So the actual file itself isn't strongly typed, per se, in the traditional notion of a "strongly typed file system." Rather, you're saying that any organizational scheme you use should have a strong notion of what the file's contents are so that it can use that metadata to organize things. The command line still sees bags of bytes with a simple pathname, and "dd" and "cat" and "cp" and "tar" all do what I expect.

As for "making the command line work," wouldn't this just be an alternate implementation of "glob"? Traditional glob is just a very primitive sort of database query: The only keys you can query against are components of the pathname. Your metadata organizational system just gives you a different thing to query against to get your set of pathnames to go act upon.

Shell and Zeitgeist: the future of GNOME?

Posted Apr 27, 2009 22:28 UTC (Mon) by ms (subscriber, #41272) [Link]

The way we'd thought about making the command line work was along the lines of:

Rather than "being in a directory", you're in a current view of the system which has constraints (i.e. you've specified some requirements on some attributes and only files that match those attributes are available).

Then ls works as normal, and cd (or some such tool) provides a means to alter the constraints. Oh yes, the other awesome feature we had was the ability to save views. So eg, you'd have a view which would specify all media files added within the last two weeks, and then you'd save that view, and could switch very quickly to it. This meant that it was worthwhile putting a couple of minutes into setting up (we have GUI tools) a good powerful view of the system (this is why I said in an earlier comment you really want a full expression engine).

Once you'd got the command line working that well, it would be easy enough to try and do some fuse type binding, but it would be tricky. I looked into it but never wrote any code in that direction.

Shell and Zeitgeist: the future of GNOME?

Posted May 5, 2009 20:16 UTC (Tue) by salimma (subscriber, #34460) [Link]

Was this ever released? This sounds tremendously useful.