very simple datastore reimplementation

[Jim Gettys]

On Thu, 2008-05-08 at 12:58 +0200, Tomeu Vizoso wrote:

> 
> Yes, the title is currently stored in the metadata file next to the
> actual file, so perhaps some ls-ds tool may be easily coded to present
> the files with names based on their title?
> 

No; this means some magic piece of code (requiring magic knowledge to
use) is required by naive people, just to do simple things.  The point
of an HTML file index is we can rely on there being a web browser at
this date on all clients.  

We clearly *do* need such a tool to expose all the additional meta data,
but to have to use it just to find one file whose name you might
remember seems very wrong to me.

I'm *very* concerned particularly about removable media, for
interoperability; and somewhat concerned even for our NAND file storage.
Here's a scenario there: people may be using distributed file systems,
to export views on the store or even to provide more space for
additional stores.  Those servers may not necessarily be Linux systems
running our software.

One way to look at this is that the ds metadata is the primary source of
metadata, but, whenever possible, we provide human usable "hints" that
reflect out into the file system.  And on some file systems with
extensible metadata systems, *someday* that file system may be able to
do all this better than we can where we currently are limited to
building on conventional file systems.
                           - Jim

-- 
Jim Gettys <jg at laptop.org>
One Laptop Per Child