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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.'"
or search by last modified time.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Or just use spotlight, Mac users have been able to do find files quickly for years.
Monstar L
... just finished editing a critical report, saved it, and then couldn't locate it to deliver to their client.
Well, there are some people who can't find Pacific Ocean on the map. I dont see map makers running around in panic, thinking how to make their maps more accessible to the general population...
You don't get it.
My grandmother could use spotlight. She won't be able to use find, locate and grep.
And that is the target audience of Shuttleworth's point: the Computer Illiterates.
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,
Why? Hans Reiser demonstrated that files can be directories too, without breaking the VFS layer.
Say we bake versioning into the file system. You want the old versions of /home/user/shopping-list.txt; you go look in /home/user/shopping-list.txt/old/1. If you want the one from yesterday you go for /home/user/shopping-list.txt/old/bytime/2008-10-24.00:00:00, and the file system figures out which of the old versions was present at that time.
Same old syntax. The name resolution is handled differently, but that's all in the file system. You could probably even write a fuse file system that adds a layer of versioning on top of another file system. No need to ever touch the apps.
If you want the duct tape solution: write a shell script that checks whether anything changed every n minutes, then commit your home directory to subversion/git/....
Do you have any numbers on how much space was used on extra versions for a "typical" distribution of files and usage patterns? TANSTAAFL and all that ;)
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.
And you wouldn't have to, if every app would just show the frigging directory tree as it exists, instead of trying to fool the user with a random bunch of stupid fake roots in every GUI.
My mother in law in upstate NY had a Windows box that she used for exactly two purposes: email, and playing online Scrabble. Her Windows machine got full of malware, to the point where it wouldn't even boot. While she was visiting us in California this summer, I set up a machine with Ubuntu for her to use, and she got fairly comfortable with GNOME and Firefox. I sent an Ubuntu install CD home with her on the plane, and she went ahead and installed it with virtually no problems. I only had to talk her through a couple of issues on the phone, the main one being non-Linux-related: her BIOS wasn't set to boot from a CD.
She got going with email, and then it was time to get her set up for scrabble. The one she plays isn't the famous facebook one, it's a java program that accesses a club's server in Romania. Well, I think I spent about an hour with her on the phone, and we still don't have it working. One thing that took us a heck of a long time was that when she downloaded the jar file for the scrabble app, neither of us could figure out where the file had gone. Probably if I'd been in the same room with her it would have only taken me thirty seconds to locate the file, but over the phone, it was more like I was experiencing it from her point of view, and it was completely confusing. She was clicking around in the Firefox download manager, in the GNOME file manager, all with no luck. It seriously took her about 20 minutes, *with my help*, to find the file. It probably didn't help that I use fluxbox myself, and am not familiar with GNOME or its file manager. (Now we're almost there, except that apparently she's got a completely dysfunctional version of the java runtime installed. You click on the widgets in the program's UI, and it doesn't respond.)
Anyway, what kind of indictment is it of Firefox/GNOME's usability when it's easier to install Linux than to find the file you just downloaded?
Of course now I have to slap a steel helmet on my head to withstand the inevitable onslaught of know-it-all slashdotters telling me what an idiot I am, and how I could have easily found the file. Of course that's always how it is with usability. To the person who already knows how to use the software, it seems painfully obvious.
Find free books.
You think it's going to be any better for people who can't find things they saved?
They can't find it because they didn't care at the time of saving to attach enough information to the file to be able to find it later. Instead, they saved it under a name like "letter5", or even worse, "asdf", and possibly left it in a random directory as well.
Tags won't be just as bad, they'll be worse. They require a considerable effort to tag consistently. You also have to think of all the possible tags that could be related to the file. Is it "friends", "acquaintances", "buddies", etc? Is it singular or plural? Will "birthdays" be enough, or you also have to file it under "parties", "celebrations" and "events" in case you remember the file you need was related to some sort of celebration but you can't remember which?
What happens with categories that are diffuse, change meaning, or their contents? For instance, take emails from Alice, that initially get tagged with "acquaintances", then progresses to "friends", then "significant other", then "ex". If you search for something that was mentioned in a friend's email, are Alice's emails tagged as they were initially (in which case after the upgrade from acquaintances to friends her previous mail needs an extra keyword to find), or have they all been updated to "ex", in which case the search might fail since she was a friend back then?
Coming up with a good keywords system is something that only geeks and secretaries are going to do. Your average person will at best pick a couple keywords, then complain they can't find stuff because they didn't use the right keywords, or that every single document comes up because all the mail is tagged as "email" and nothing else.
Who cares? Are people really so insecure about their OS that they want the reinforcment of knowing that even senile grandmothers can and do use it? Personally I would prefer it that the idiots _weren't_ using the same OS as me.
If you (not *you* you, the generic "other" you) don't care where you are storing your files, then I don't care if you find it hard to find them. Removing the usefulness for ad hoc organisation, and improving search functionality is tantamount to just doing away with the hierarchical file-system altogether. Welcome to the 60s - enjoy your stay. This "it shouldn't require me to think" attitude is the attitude which gets people driving cars off river embankments because of their reliance on their GPS system.
Yes, this patronising and pure, unadulterated, snobbery; I won't pretend otherwise. No need to flame me for it; I already know.
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