[Evolution] Filing system

[Ryan Heise <ryan whitewolf com au>]

I don't have evolution working yet, but I am interested in how it does
virtual folders. In this interview with Jakob Nielsen on Slashdot:

        http://slashdot.org/interviews/00/03/03/096223.shtml

he writes:

        "We also know from many studies that the average user is very bad at
hierarchical filing and typically never moves a file once it gets to
live in some directory. Even if the file would be better off elsewhere.
This problem is magnified several hundred times when it comes to
managing email. I am starting to think that the solution is to treat
information objects as members of a soup and manage them by attributes
rather than by hierarchy and name."

That is, "real" folders are gone and everything is based on "virtual"
folders. My interest is in a system to replace the standard hierarchical
filesystem, however such a system could be reused for storing/accessing
anything, including email. Because the attributes idea is a radical
change, I am looking for a solution that is backwards compatible with
the old hierarchical naming scheme. One idea is as follows:

Assigning attributes to files is much like placing a file in a folder.
All files with the same attribute are simply assigned as children of a
folder (so that they belong to that category). To allow multiple
attributes to be assigned to a file, this maps to having multiple parent
folders. In other words, attributes and folders are the same thing. As a
result, attributes (let's call them categories) can now have parent
categories. My thoughts are a bit sketchy from this point on, but
basically it seems to provide backwards compatibility with the old
hierarchical referencing scheme.

Of course, virtual folders are still needed since they basically
represent queries.

Does the evolution mailer use a similar system? It would be nice to
evolve an idea that is powerful for both email storage/access and
filesystem storage/access.

-- 
Ryan Heise

http://www.progsoc.uts.edu.au/~rheise/