Re: [Evolution] Filing system

[NotZed <notzed helixcode 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.

I'll let others do the flaming, but well, an indexed flat file isn't
really any performance problem at all (and you can even repair it
with vi!).  Even less so when you have virtual folders, since it
isn't actually moving messages around, just performing queries.

What we have IS a database, it just doesn't look like one.
(and no silly arguments about what constitutes a database and
what doesn't).