Re: [gentoo-dev] (FS) Attributes for Ebuilds?

[Evan Powers <powers.161@osu.edu>]

On Thursday 05 June 2003 03:21 am, Michael Kohl wrote:
> Joseph Hardin <jhlazer@charter.net> wrote:
> > Why do this at a filesystem level? I may be missing the point, but why
> > not just incorporate this into a seperate tool and keep a file to
> > store all the comments and data.
>
> Because:
...

If you haven't already, you should read Hans Reiser's Future Visions document, 
here:

http://www.namesys.com/whitepaper.html

The summary is, in brief, that ReiserFS 6 (current version is 4) is going to 
really kick ass. From what I understand it has a superset of BeFS's 
functionality.

You'll be able to do things like (syntax isn't actually decided yet):

bash$ ls '[subject/[illegal strike] to/elves from/santa ultimatum]'

Which would list any files you have which have a subject attribute containing 
sub-attributes illegal and strike, the attribute ultimatum, etc. (Your email 
program and the filesystem would each automatically generate pieces of these 
attribute trees.) Technically they aren't "attributes", but instead part of 
the filename itself--it's just that filenames would now have two operators, 
'/' (ordering) and '[ ... ]' (grouping), instead of only one, '/'.

Regardless, while I very much like your idea on principle, I do think it's an 
idea whose time has not yet come. That doesn't mean we can't think about how 
to do it when it's time does come, however. ;-)

Evan


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