Re: Icons of program

[Ronald Offerman <ron bofh-home gjt-it nl>]

Ok, second attempt to get my database-oriented opinion across.

Suppose we create a filesystem service on a reserved port with a database 
lurking behind it in which we can (but are not forced) to store file 
characteristics (I hate populating the fs with .info or .desktop files, a 
worse case scenario would mean the fs would hold twice the number of files).
I first characterized this as an extended locatedb, this db should be 
searchable too and could extend over several hosts.

A skeleton db layout:
- host; localhost, etc, providing a virtual fs across hosts, this could also 
be used to define a filesystem view
- fstype; eg. ext2,nfs,ftp,minix,vfat,hpfs,ntfs etc.
- path; using an agreed upon dir separator
- filename
- file-attribs; will depend on fstype but could include several 
icons(selected/unselected,8bpp,16bpp,24bpp) default editor, should also ID 
executable for less fortunate fstypes
- user-attribs; preferred editor, hidden/shown, alternative name, alternative 
path

File-attribs and user-attribs could/should be in a separate table, these 
attribs could also be used to provide a history of file used.

A filesystem view combined with alternative paths could create a complete 
user-fs.

This scheme doesn't break any of the current fs in use; a compliant 
application would request the required info from the database and a cronjob 
should check the integrity of the db, kernel patches could make this 
implemented right at the core of the OS, but wrappers for the standard utils 
should also be available.

Using a db doesn't eat into available inodes, would make this somewhat 
portable, would present a unified filesystem to ordinary users, would provide 
easy accounting & maintenance.

I have been playing with large datasets in MySQL lately and it is a likely 
candidate to be used; if the access to the db would be SQL, any SQL db could 
be used, I would feed all our hosts to MS SQL until it choked ;-).

Thinking about this I was wondering if Linux Directory Services would be a 
good thing ;=)

-- 
<- Ronald Offerman -IT Specialist
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