On Fri, Mar 02, 2007 at 01:06:44PM +0000, Tuomo Valkonen wrote: > Come to think of it, perhaps people are going the wrong way > about database file systems: implementing them on top of a > conventional FS, giving useless names to the files under the > database file system's control. Perhaps it would be better > to have at the bottom an unorganised data store with only > abstract identies for objects, and then have additional > systems on top of that providing names to things that need > them: traditional hierarchical, setfs-style, whatever fits > the application. Files could have names in multiple systems, > and Not every file would need to have an identity in any of > these systems (except one providing access to the files with > the meaningless identifiers in an uniform manner).
And how do you ensure that every program can interact with every file? Capability Systems provide a very good way through a pattern that has started to be known as the "powerbox", plash[1] is an implementation for GNU/Linux that looks as though it can replace the GTK file-open dialog with one that would return a "capability" to the file rather than its name. It would be possible to extend this idea and make the plash file chooser aware of different ways of finding files. Sam [1] http://plash.beasts.org/
