Linked by Marcus Carlson on Wed 21st Jul 2004 18:17 UTC
In these days there has been much fuzzing about the new browsing with files organizing themselves with the help of meta data. Maybe you ask yourself "What have this to do with the spatial browsing in gnome and how can it improve the browsing?". That's what I did. As I see it, the gnome people have introduced the spatial browsing so we are used to it when this new browsing is coming to town. This is very intelligent move of the gnome people and will help us adopt faster to this. This is when the spatial browsing is really making sense. I hope you see this when you've read this article.
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I think (and this is just my opinion) that it is a matter of both elegance and technical merit.
The "cram it into whatever-vfs" approach seems to be to be a hack. People can't or don't want to put that work into the operating system (the GNOME and KDE acronyms are missing an L-for-Linux for a reason :-) so they put it in their very own vfs layer.
If some data describe an object they should be attached to that object. Not written on sticky notes and tacked on the side of a monitor or scribbled on a desk blotter.
Additionally, by storing the metadata in the filesystem, approaches can be taken to ensure that performance is not affected. All UNIX(-like) file systems (that I am aware of) store the metadata for an object (it's permissions, owner, group, [acm]times, etc) near the data (in the inode) and trys to allocate blocks for the data as near to the inode as possible. By storing metadata in an external store you leave the system open to the possibility of have to seek between ends of the disc very often. This wouldn't be much of a problem (even without caching) due to the fairly advanced disc scheduling algorithms in use today, but it may be. Also it introduces a single point of failure. One file gets deleted or corrupted and there goes the tags on my umpteen MP3 files and the titles and authors of my n-thousand document PDF archive.
Putting it in the application VFS layer is a hack for those who have no alternative. As a prototype it can be useful, as a workaround for difficult situations (like portability) it can be helpful, as an elegant feature, it lacks sorely.
Again, this is just my opinion.