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TMSU: a tool born out of frustration with the hierarchical nature of filesystems

tmsu.org

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Re: TMSU: a tool born out of frustration with the hierarchical nature of filesystems

#21

Post by seagreen »

A great idea! I think tags are definitely a better way to organize most personal data than trees.

Also I like that they describe what data they actually change on your computer right on the homepage: "TMSU does not alter your files in any way: they remain unchanged on disk, or on the network, wherever you put them. TMSU maintains its own database and you simply gain an additional view, which you can mount, based upon the tags you set up."

Unfortunately building on a foundation of sand (meaning not TMSU's code, but Unix filesystems) has downsides:

https://github.com/oniony/TMSU/wiki/FAQ#why-does-tmsu-not-de...

" Why does TMSU not detect file moves and renames?

To detect file moves/renames would require a daemon process watching the file system for changes and support from the file system for these events. As some file systems cannot provide these events (e.g. remote file systems) a universal solution cannot be offered. Such a function may be added later for those file systems that do provide file move/modification events but adding support for this to TMSU is not a priority at this time.

The current solution is to periodically use the repair command which will detect moved/renamed files and also update fingerprints for modified files. (The limitation of this is that files that are both moved/renamed and modified cannot be detected.) "

Ouch.

Re: TMSU: a tool born out of frustration with the hierarchical nature of filesystems

#22

Post by ori_b »

kpil wrote: post #18
zaphar wrote: post #4

I'm actually not frustrated with the hierarchical nature of filesystems. I'm most frustrated with the state of filesystem search these days. I don't want to tag and curate my files. I want to search them. I've strung together something using bleve full-text search and some OCR libs to scratch my particular itch but it still doesn't quite get all there.

I agree. I actually like the hierarchical organisation, and I don't like the 10 year usability trend, particularly driven by Microsofts attempts to patch over their horrid structure with even worse workarounds. The solution to learning my mother were to find her documents is not hiding the place 15 levels deep and having 10 symlinks to it. Fast, unobtrusive indexing and a good structure is all that is needed. Humans…

Tags are a subset of hierarchies + symlinks. If you have a one level hierarchy, you have the equivalent of tags.

Re: TMSU: a tool born out of frustration with the hierarchical nature of filesystems

#23

Post by Chris2048 »

It would seems to me a better idea to order the VFS around queries - a command-line command returns a query id, which represents a directory in the VFS (such that the command is a bit like a mkdir for the VFS), the dir might then be '/foo/tmsumountpoint//', and contains symlinks for all files found in the query.

I'm sure FUSE can do this.

Re: TMSU: a tool born out of frustration with the hierarchical nature of filesystems

#25

Post by swalsh »

I seem to recall reading somewhere that one of the reasons Vista was a "bad" os, was that it originally had much higher more optimistic ambitions to build a sql like file system (i suppose similar to this). It however had issues, and a decision to scrap it delayed the vista project, and reduced the scope of "cool" things it was supposed to deliver.

Re: TMSU: a tool born out of frustration with the hierarchical nature of filesystems

#26

Post by teraflop »

swalsh wrote: post #25

I seem to recall reading somewhere that one of the reasons Vista was a "bad" os, was that it originally had much higher more optimistic ambitions to build a sql like file system (i suppose similar to this). It however had issues, and a decision to scrap it delayed the vista project, and reduced the scope of "cool" things it was supposed to deliver.

Yep: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinFS

Re: TMSU: a tool born out of frustration with the hierarchical nature of filesystems

#28

Post by vlunkr »

kpil wrote: post #18
zaphar wrote: post #4

I'm actually not frustrated with the hierarchical nature of filesystems. I'm most frustrated with the state of filesystem search these days. I don't want to tag and curate my files. I want to search them. I've strung together something using bleve full-text search and some OCR libs to scratch my particular itch but it still doesn't quite get all there.

I agree. I actually like the hierarchical organisation, and I don't like the 10 year usability trend, particularly driven by Microsofts attempts to patch over their horrid structure with even worse workarounds. The solution to learning my mother were to find her documents is not hiding the place 15 levels deep and having 10 symlinks to it. Fast, unobtrusive indexing and a good structure is all that is needed. Humans…

You have to realize though that this software doesn't take away your heiracichal system, it just gives you another way to look at it. Recently I've been cleaning up my music library and I'm seeing some of the shortcomings of the current system. What do you do with a compilation album? Have a folder for each artist or put them all together, (Which would separate them from others works by the same artist)? iTunes or whatever media player you use will probably list them in both locations depending on how you sort or whatever. I find this to be a useful feature, why wouldn't you like to have the option to do that sort of thing from the command line?

Re: TMSU: a tool born out of frustration with the hierarchical nature of filesystems

#29

Post by rincebrain »

swalsh wrote: post #25

I seem to recall reading somewhere that one of the reasons Vista was a "bad" os, was that it originally had much higher more optimistic ambitions to build a sql like file system (i suppose similar to this). It however had issues, and a decision to scrap it delayed the vista project, and reduced the scope of "cool" things it was supposed to deliver.

The thing you're thinking of was indeed supposed to be in Vista, then post-Vista, and then scrapped all together - WinFS.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinFS

Re: TMSU: a tool born out of frustration with the hierarchical nature of filesystems

#30

Post by kbenson »

seagreen wrote: post #21

A great idea! I think tags are definitely a better way to organize most personal data than trees. Also I like that they describe what data they actually change on your computer right on the homepage: "TMSU does not alter your files in any way: they remain unchanged on disk, or on the network, wherever you put them. TMSU maintains its own database and you simply gain an additional view, which you can mount, based upon…

Hmm, seems like they could have gone the other way, throw everything into a DB, and then wrote a fuse plugin to access it all through traditional file system mechanics. That would have allowed for gating direct access such that moves and renames could be dealt with accordingly. Of course, there are other problems with that approach, but probably not as many as you might think (the file system is a database, so you're really just choosing a back-end that is less likely to be directly accessed).
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