Shuttleworth On Redefining File Systems

moteyalpha writes "Mark Shuttleworth described the beginnings of what could a great step forward in making file systems more usable. I've personally had the experience of trying to find a file for a customer who had just finished editing a critical report, saved it, and then couldn't locate it to deliver to their client. Quoting: 'My biggest concern on this front is that it be done in a way that every desktop environment can embrace. We need a consistent experience across GNOME, KDE, OpenOffice and Firefox so that content can flow from app to app in a seamless fashion and the user's expectations can be met no matter which app or environment they happen to use. If someone sends a file to me over Empathy, and I want to open it in Amarok, then I shouldn't have to work with two completely different mental models of content storage.'"

Comments

This would be easy

[CRCulver]

I've personally had the experience of trying to find a file for a customer who had just finished editing a critical report, saved it, and then couldn't locate it to deliver to their client

Was it a Word file? Locate all .docs, run them through antiword, grep for words from that critical report, and report back the matches. Less than a minute of Bash scripting.

Re:This would be easy

[tolan-b]

So like Tracker that comes installed by default on Gnome based distributions then?

Or Beagle, that was released somewhat before Spotlight.

Re:This would be easy

[jonaskoelker]

"duh just type ~rf - m" or something something, because yeah, a menu to do that would kill someone

For no one thing would a menu item to do that thing be particularly bad. But you can't put _every_ task in a menu, because there are infinitely many tasks.

If you find people often tell you to type in commands you don't understand, it's probably because it's the most efficient way to do something once you do master it. See for instance http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-newbie-8/modifying-functions-678643/. I've built a 1650-byte podcatcher in #!sh [and that's including proper error-checking and all].

It's also dense communication-wise; compare "sudo ifconfig eth0 192.168.0.1" with "System -> Administration -> Network; unlock, wired connection, properties, enable, static ip, 192.168.0.1".

That being said, though, deskenvs should support the most common and important tasks in an easy-to-use way.

Expansive syntax, and the work required....

[ka9dgx]

Version control, searching, and all of the other advances since the first directory tree are good things to add, but they must be supported down to the application level.

VAX/VMS had a wonderful system of versioning baked right into things, if you worked on a file, it kept versions for you as you saved them....

login.com;1
login.com;2
login.com;3
.. etc.

The default was the last version, unless you explicitly chose a different one. This is an incredibly useful tool, and I still miss it to this day, 20 years after I last used it.

If you can't express an idea explicitly, your power of expression is radically limited. If we can get consensus and support a bigger set of expressions, we can do a whole bunch of cool new stuff. As long as we follow the leader, we'll never do anything this innovative, and we'll always be playing catch up.

It won't be easy!

To do even this simple thing with Linux, all of our applications would have to be re-written to enable a new file specification syntax, hopefully one reasonably compatible with the past. We're talking about a shitload of work, so it's important to agree on a set of goals first, to avoid having to re-do it later.

--Mike--

Re:In other news,

[woot account]

This is largely the idea behind GoboLinux I think. As a matter of fact, a lot of what's going to be said here has probably already been said here.