Filesystem path ordering overrated.

[C. Scott Ananian]

[I found this email in my 'saved drafts' folder; I think I've
mentioned my unordered tags experiments before, but I figured I'd send
this off anyway.]

Discussing next-gen journal designs, I often bring up 'ordered tags'
as a necessary way to make the journal cooperate better with
filesystems.

The response usually is that additional context is sufficient to
disambiguate tag sets, you don't actually need ordering.  That is,
it's okay if a/b is indistinguishable from b/a -- in practice one will
really be c/a/b and the other will be b/a/d or whatever, and you can
use the extra tag 'c' or 'd' to disambiguate.

I ran a script over the complete contents of my laptop's filesystem,
and I was rather surprised that the responders were correct: I have
few files on my filesystem which would be indistiguishable with
completely unordered paths.
More details at http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Experiments_with_unordered_paths
  --scott
-- 
 ( http://cscott.net/ )