Personally, i dream of a stateless, tag/attribute-based, tree-less operating system. “directories” would not be neccessary but a tag could be displayed as one in file managers. Want to load a library? type:library, name:xyz it is.
Stuff is there on the disk anyway, you just have to identify it.
But that would require the kernel, a file system and the tooling made for this.
But maybe we get there; since the young generation isn’t used to file trees anymore.
I think what you’re looking for is simply an indexer + UI that sorts your filesystem by tags rather than by directory structure. Not sure if that’s as beneficial as you imagine it to be, but IIRC KDE allows you to do something like that in Dolphin.
No, they always have to keep a index uptodate. And no synch (or even compatibility) with other such tooling. Only thing that comes close currently is xattributes some fs support. But they are wholly a undefined blank slate.
Dolphin (well, whatever the KDE’s indexer is called) uses xattrs under the hood for tagging, so it will be compatible with other software (including {get,set}fattr).
The index has to be up-to-date, but then that would be true with any tag-based filesystem, it’s just happening on a different layer (and arguably a layer which is more suitable for this - not sure it’d be a good idea to enforce synchronous indexing during xattr writes).
The most significant user-facing obstacle is lack of software which supports this system, but I guess that shows that there’s not much desire for it in reality.
But even in NixOS there are issues with non-FHS paths. And the kernel expects some paths too, also the whole bootstrapping thing. Sure, they could just be adapted.
Personally, i dream of a stateless, tag/attribute-based, tree-less operating system. “directories” would not be neccessary but a tag could be displayed as one in file managers. Want to load a library? type:library, name:xyz it is.
Stuff is there on the disk anyway, you just have to identify it.
But that would require
the kernel, a file system and the tooling made for this.But maybe we get there; since the young generation isn’t used to file trees anymore.
Edit: ok, scratch the kernel, it could work.
I think what you’re looking for is simply an indexer + UI that sorts your filesystem by tags rather than by directory structure. Not sure if that’s as beneficial as you imagine it to be, but IIRC KDE allows you to do something like that in Dolphin.
No, they always have to keep a index uptodate. And no synch (or even compatibility) with other such tooling. Only thing that comes close currently is xattributes some fs support. But they are wholly a undefined blank slate.
About advantages, no broken paths would be one.
Dolphin (well, whatever the KDE’s indexer is called) uses xattrs under the hood for tagging, so it will be compatible with other software (including {get,set}fattr).
The index has to be up-to-date, but then that would be true with any tag-based filesystem, it’s just happening on a different layer (and arguably a layer which is more suitable for this - not sure it’d be a good idea to enforce synchronous indexing during xattr writes).
The most significant user-facing obstacle is lack of software which supports this system, but I guess that shows that there’s not much desire for it in reality.
You described a file system. You can make that system easily and put in any os. You don’t have to make and os for one feature.
But even in NixOS there are issues with non-FHS paths. And the kernel expects some paths too, also the whole bootstrapping thing. Sure, they could just be adapted.
Wouldn’t it just require a kernel module rather than a whole kernel?