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

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

#111

Post by stordoff »

lucb1e wrote: post #47

I looked for a tagging system months ago, did fairly extensive research into existing solutions (rather than writing a FUSE layer myself) and TMSU was the leading result. I installed it and it's all ready to use. Today, it's still all ready to use. I haven't touched it. I'm actually quite happy with the way my filesystem works, I just had this idea how great it would be to work with tag selections instead. The only r…

> in general I create one or two symlinks a year and I'm good. The hierarchy works fine.

Same here. I have a few things that tags would be nice for, but it's infrequent enough that current filesystems are fine. Couple of examples

* Tagging the source [CD/iTunes/Amazon etc.] of my music - tags would be nice (and possibly doable as IDTags etc.) but "/music/source/artist/album" or "/music/artist/album [source]" works fine

* Multiple paths to the same file - I have various media (movies, music, books, TV shows etc.) related to a single series in one folder. Those should also be in my main music etc. folders. Again tagging with the series name to make a virtual "series" folder would be nice, but symlinks solve that and it happens infrequently enough that it isn't an issue.

Other than those edge cases, I'd say most of my data fits pretty well into a hierarchical structure.

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

#112

Post by copperx »

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.

There needs to be a middle ground between hierarchical organization and search. Hierarchical organization is painful because an object can only be in one place in the hierarchy (disregarding links, which are a hack), and search by itself (as implemented in e.g., Spotlight) is not optimal because spatial/temporal/conceptual clustering of documents is important for discovery of related materials.

I have more than 5 todo.txts scattered in my system. I have cloned my webpage's git repository countless times in my local drive. I have countless LaTeX documents named letter.tex.

Of course, if I search for letter.txt I get a hit, but what other documents in my system did I create around the same date? were any other associated file changes? these questions are hard to answer in a hierarchical filesystem.

While we're at it, we should separate the task of document naming and classification from document saving. Right now, if I create a document in say, Microsoft Word and I want to make sure it gets saved, I have to pick not only a discoverable filename but also the right place for it in the hierarchical tree. I am just trying to type up a quick letter and get it printed, not grapple with the philosophical question of "where does this file belong and what should I name it?"

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

#113

Post by ZenPsycho »

cvwright wrote: post #103
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…

Couldn't they just create a hardlink in a private, hidden directory that they control, and then symlink to that? Then, it's OK if the original file gets renamed or moved, as long as it stays on the same FS. You still have your hardlink, and so your symlink still works.

what if you really want to delete the file tho? (passwords, customer data, incriminating evidence) then you have to remember to delete it from this system too!

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

#114

Post by igravious »

solipsism wrote: post #98
igravious wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder about this a lot. File systems are arranged hierarchically. Fluke of development? Library catalogues are organised hierarchically. Lucky coincidence? Books themselves are laid out hierarchically. I see a pattern emerging, but is it a trick of the light? Seems like we like to chunk and splay amorphous informational units into graph-like rooted structures. Maybe cuz of its flexibility? For something we use all…

We have all sorts of associations -- our brain is fundamentally an association engine. One kind of association is simplification/abstraction. This perhaps proves to be one of the most useful kinds of associations, because it helps us make decisions quickly without sifting through massive amounts of data. I'd say it's fundamental, not any kind of mystery.

If language-use and conceptualisation are not any kind of mystery I'm sure you won't mind explaining how language acquisition works? Also, why does natural language grammar appear to be mildly context-sensitive and not context-free nor fully context-sensitive? Also, given the topic: why does the brain stereotype, and what's up with cognitive prototyping? Also, how does the brain associate the objects of conception with words? Also, how much of language's basic machinery is hard-wired? Also, how are lexicons formed? Also, is thought simply language or something else? Also, are the different languages backed by different conceptual schema?

Btw, Frege, following Hume has pointed out that abstraction is an equivalence relation: http://logic.uconn.edu/2015/01/21/reference-and-invariance-i... I wouldn't lump simplification and abstraction together, and characterising them both as associations feels wrong.

What I'm trying to say is that your time would be better spent in not correcting every instance of mild hyperbole on HN :)

And mine too. :)

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

#115

Post by copperx »

tremon wrote: post #73
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'm not a big fan of semantic search itself, nor do I enjoy meticulously tagging my files. But I would love to have different views of my files, based on different metadata. I know that I'm not always searching for files along the same hierarchy: sometimes I want to search along a timeline, because I know that I edited two files around the same time. Or I remember where I was when I wrote something, and I'd like to s…

I actually made a sibling post highlighting almost the same paint points as you, which makes me think we may be onto something ...

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

#116

Post by noja »

copperx wrote: post #112
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.

There needs to be a middle ground between hierarchical organization and search. Hierarchical organization is painful because an object can only be in one place in the hierarchy (disregarding links, which are a hack), and search by itself (as implemented in e.g., Spotlight) is not optimal because spatial/temporal/conceptual clustering of documents is important for discovery of related materials. I have more than 5 tod…

Why don't you put everything in one folder and name it with what the document is?

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

#118

Post by prewett »

I feel like I must be missing something, but I feel like tags is just a band-aid. If you have enough files, you will end up with too many tags to manage (think of a tag directory filled with tag files, instead of a home directory filled with actual files), so you'll need hierarchical tags. Or kludge it with "tag/subtag" which looks a lot like a directory. GMail added nested tags, which seems to me like an admission that flat tags is not sufficient.

One problem is that regular people don't know how to organize a hierarchy. General -> specific works really well, but that requires the ability to generalize.

The only use I can see for tags is if you want files to be a member of more than one directory. Other than music, everything I have is generally created for a specific purpose, so tags are not particularly helpful.

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

#119

Post by deprave »

RubyPinch wrote: post #105
deprave wrote: post #11

UI nitpicking: These: $ tmsu tag summer.mp3 music big-jazz mp3 $ tmsu tag --tags "music mp3" foo.mp3 bar.mp3 $ tmsu tag spring.mp3 year=2003 Are confusing. Very non-Unix. They should be: $ tmsu tag music,mp3,year=2003 summer.mp3

I have to ask, how are they non-unix?

They're inconsistent. Sometimes the file name comes before something and sometimes after something. It's a lot easier to remember commands if their structure is uniform, and Unix commands usually have the general structure of "program [options] [files]"

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

#120

Post by tremon »

igravious wrote: post #82
tremon wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Glad to be of (some) help :) I'm not a developmental psychologist btw, just have an interest in cognitive development. The proof you're looking for would be more the field of cognitive neuroscience. There definitely are graph-like connections between concepts all over the brain, I didn't mean to suggest that our brains work hierarchical only, to the exclusion of all other relations. As an example: if our brains were…

I wonder about this a lot. File systems are arranged hierarchically. Fluke of development? Library catalogues are organised hierarchically. Lucky coincidence? Books themselves are laid out hierarchically. I see a pattern emerging, but is it a trick of the light? Seems like we like to chunk and splay amorphous informational units into graph-like rooted structures. Maybe cuz of its flexibility? For something we use all…

I see a pattern emerging, but is it a trick of the light?

I think it is fundamental. A hierarchy forms naturally from iterative steps of aggregation and differentiation: first, group all similar objects together; then, for each high-level group, look for differences within each group, and split the groups into smaller subgroups. Rinse and repeat until you've reached an acceptable number of items per group.

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