Linked by Thom Holwerda on Wed 25th Jul 2012 22:18 UTC
The article I'm about to link to, by Oliver Reichenstein, is pretty terrible, but it's a good way for me to bring up something I've been meaning to talk about. First, the article: "Apple has been working on its file system and with iOS it had almost killed the concept of folders - before reintroducing them with a peculiar restriction: only one level! With Mountain Lion it brings its one folder level logic to OSX. What could be the reason for such a restrictive measure?" So, where does this crusade against directory structures (not file systems, as the article aggravatingly keeps stating) come from?
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RE[7]: The debate that will never end...
by Alfman on Thu 26th Jul 2012 18:14
in reply to "RE[6]: The debate that will never end..."
Member since:2011-01-28
I appreciate the 40k foot view.
By the way, the controversy isn't over exposing users to the native file system per say (most users shouldn't have to be aware of the native file system in my opinion). It is over whether user directories should be totally flat, with all of a user's files in a single directory, or if users should be allowed to place files in separate directories to organise them.
Member since:
2011-01-26
One man argues that if you're to get all aspects of an OS and it's applications to use only an e-mail like organisation of files using only meta-data then you'd need to do away with regular user access to the file system...
otherwise some applications will use the file system as the default means for file access and therefore some files won't have/need the meta-data and we stay in the situation we're in now.
Another man argues that he doesn't want to live in that world, it'd be totally impractical for doing his job. The file system needs to exist for so many functions.
Both are correct and I hope both would agree that in an ideal situation, anyone looking to implement an OS without regular user access to the file system would would implement it well enough to make it worth everyone's time (by saving it) but still make access to the file system a trivial root/administrator function for those that need it.
BTW, I have no problem finding files. Name, dates, extension, location etc. is more than enough for me but I understand why people like the e-mail concept.