ReiserFS: Interesting (for me) article

[Sean Hogan]

Read http://www.namesys.com/whitepaper.html last week.

Probably nothing new for most of you.  It gave me a few ideas I wanted to
try out.

For a quick overview, I would read the Abstract and the Examples.

The first example talks about backward compatiblity:


/etc/passwd

Ordering and grouping are not just better; file system upward compatibility
makes them cheaper for unifying naming in OSes based on hierarchical file
systems than a relational naming system would be. This approach is fully
upwardly compatible with the old file system. Users should be able to retain
their old habits for as long as they wish, engage in a slow comfortable
migration, and incorporate the new features into their habits as they feel
the desire. Elderly programs should be untroubled in their operation. Many
worthwhile projects fail because they emphasize how much they wish to change
rather than asking of the user the minimal collection of changes necessary
to achieve the added functionality.



And I thought... for the first time in a long while... maybe backward
compatibility won't be so hard.

Say that a TUNES-like environment delivers data to applications based on a
reference and a context (and maybe other information).

The file-system that interfaces with the TUNES-like daemon can determine the
context... text/binary, html, csv, whatever.  You could even implement
devices... anyway... i'm going to shut up now.

cheers,
sdh