Re: another semantic storage system (in userspace)

[Jonathan Briggs <jbriggs@esoft.com>]

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On Thu, 2006-07-13 at 16:30 -0400, Hubert Chan wrote:
> On Thu, 13 Jul 2006 10:38:23 -0700, Hans Reiser <reiser@namesys.com> said:
> 
> > Clay Barnes wrote:
> 
> >> 1) Scope
> >> a) Should the semantic content of files be purely user-defined?
> 
> > Yes.
> 
> I guess this also raises the question of how multiple users on the same
> machine can define their own semantic content (e.g. if user A wants to
> index some new file format, but doesn't want to have to bug the
> administrator to add support for it).  Will the filesystem be talking to
> some userspace daemons?

I was thinking that the file system should only index its own meta-data
attributes.  A user-space daemon should read the file contents and
create these attributes.

Search directories would display selected parts of the indexes.  One of
these that would be highly useful for a user-space indexing daemon is a
timestamp search directory.  The indexer would begin with the timestamp
search set to (UID == my user and timestamp > 0).  After indexing a few
files it would update the search to (my user and > timestamp of last
indexed file).  Or possibly, if Reiser4 has something like a 64-bit
monotonic update ID, it could use that instead of a timestamp.

If the filesystem indexes are not going to be updated in real-time but
only at specific times, another search type that could list updated but
not yet indexed files would also be useful.
-- 
Jonathan Briggs <jbriggs@esoft.com>
eSoft, Inc.

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