very simple datastore reimplementation

[Tomeu Vizoso]

On Thu, May 8, 2008 at 12:31 PM, Jim Gettys <jg at laptop.org> wrote:
> 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.

I'm having trouble understanding what you are requesting and what
could be done about that.

Can you please enumerate the requirements that affect the internal
file layout and any other view that we may be able to provide?

Thanks,

Tomeu