Re: [Evolution] Filing system

["Bruce C. Dillahunty" <bdillahu peachbush com>]

> 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.

I agree with all of this... I have also been looking at things in this 
light... one product that may pkay in this space (admittedly a commercial 
product) is Oracle's iFS. Another is reiserfs... right now they are 
concentrating on the journalling file system, but

http://devlinux.com/projects/reiserfs/whitepaper.html

has some ideas which seem similar.

> 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.

My concern with Evolution is the direction of storing mail in mbox (or IMAP or 
...) files, instead of a database. The virtual folders are the way to go, as 
far as I'm concerned, but is this the right backend???

gmail - http://gmail.linuxpower.org/ - has a nice try at this also, but is 
strictly email, and I think the GUI isn't moving in the direction I want...

No offense intended to anybody... there is a lot of great work here... I just 
wanted to put some ideas out for discussion.

Bruce

> -- 
> Ryan Heise

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

-- 
Bruce C. Dillahunty
Peachbush Enterprises
bdillahu peachbush com