Some filesystem thoughts

[Ivan Voras]

On 20/02/2013 20:26, Radio młodych bandytów wrote:

> The way I see it is not to treat files as streams of bytes. That's not
> what they are, files have meanings and there are tools that bring them
> out. A picture is a stored emotion. OK, there are no tools for that yet.
> But it is also an array of pixels. And a container with exif data. And
> may be a container with an encrypted archive. And, a stream of bytes too.
> They have multiple facets.
> I think that it would be useful to somehow expose them to applications.
> Wouldn't it be useful to be able to grep through pdfs in your email
> attachments?

I think the problem is presentation - offering just the "grep" function
is waste of effort since those using GUIs will generally not use grep.
What you're talking about is something like google tried to do with
android (and, probably, failed): a unified search interface across all
applications and their data.

Actually, modern smartphones & tablets are slowly moving into the
direction that there are no "files" and no "filesystems" on your device,
but rather jost your "data" and "apps" which both are managed by the
system (and possibly reside in a "cloud"). It may be that the
"hierarhical filesystem" idea has just not so useful or efficient any
more (but OTOH, I don't see it going away any time soon).

> Mass-edit music tags with sed? Manually edit with your favourite text
> editor instead of the sucky one-liner provided by your favourite music
> player?
> How about video players being able to play videos by reading them in
> decoded form directly from the filesystem instead of having to integrate
> a significant number of complex libraries to provide sufficient format
> coverage?

All those things already exist (or will exist soon) in modern GUI
desktop environments, and especially on handheld-enabled OSes. The way
they are achieved is to introduce a Grand Unified Interface (or several
of them, as it happens), which severly abstract the low-level libraries,
even to the point where the (GUI) application doesn't know it's dealing
with actual files or something completely different.

If you're more concerned about the technical aspects, then learning to
write filesystems in FUSE would be a good starting point for you.



-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 260 bytes
Desc: OpenPGP digital signature
URL: <http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-fs/attachments/20130227/601cd783/attachment.sig>