Hi,
I've just come across Tracker and was intrigued by https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/Tracker/WhatIsTracker >
"What does Tracker offer?" especially the statement:
"Users may completely move away from a folder-hierarchy based home folder, and instead organise their data into collections using tags. The combination of tagging support in the file-chooser, tagging awareness in Nautilus, or even a tag based filesystem using FUSE could allow radical exploration of new desktop ideas."
I've been investigating a much simpler version of this idea based on storing tags in extended attributes and displaying them through a FUSE.
>From what I've learned so far about the Linux VFS (Virtual File System (Switch)) it strongly enforces a tree-like hierarchy and unique file names.
It's not clear if the VFS allows adding support for additional file types so it appears that tags would have to be transposed into directories in the VFS.
This leads to various challenges. especially in creating new files in the FUSE. I.e. where are you in relation to the underlying file system as you step through FUSE directories that are really tags? How do you indicate you are creating a new tag and not a new directory? could the FUSE implement a mktag command? Where should you create a new file and what tags should it have?
At the moment I'm thinking that using a FUSE to insert tags into the existing directory structure of an underlying file system might work for read and possibly write. This makes for deeper and potentially unwieldy directory structures. But if you start hiding directories from the underlying filesystem in the FUSE then updates become trickier.
Would appreciate your comments or pointers to any thoughts you've had about this issue.
thanks,
Greg
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