GSoC: Semantic File System

[Gabriele Modena]

On Sun, Mar 22, 2009 at 6:52 PM, Robert Watson <rwatson at freebsd.org> wrote:
> We are certainly not uninterested in projects along these lines, but I think
> the trick will be creating a convincing proposal that argues that (a) you
> can do the work in a summer, (b) there's a compelling usage case for
> including the results in FreeBSD, and (c) find a mentor who can supervise
> you in this project.

Thanks, I will keep it on mind when writing the proposal.
How do you suggest to proceed for finding a mentor?

By the way, this is a project that I'm very probably going to carry on
even without GSoC support
(even though that would be very useful).


> What sort of semantic file system do you have in mind?
>  How would you feel about a middle-ground project along the lines of Mac OS
> X Spotlight or similar efficient userspace indexing of a file system based
> on feedback from the file system about what has changed, or something
> BeOS-like, in which indexing takes place for extended attributes rather than
> for contents?

In this moment I am considering also an userspace approach similar to
Spotlight/Beagles,
but I don't know how I could propose this as a FreeBSD GSoC project.

What I have in mind at the moment would be an indexing based on
contents rather than extended fs attributes.
I did not know about the BeOS semantics capabilities, I will surely
have a look at that.