Re: The argument for fs assistance in handling archives (was: silent semantic changes with reiser4)

Christer Weinigel
2004-09-02T18:24:30Z

Jamie Lokier <jamie@shareable.org> writes:

> 1. Local Google (by which I mean a search engine on your local machine),
> Real-time (by which I mean the results are always up to date):
>
> Every file modified since last search is known to the query engine.
> This is a reality: BeOS does it; WinFS is expected to do it.
>
> Thus we have real-time local free text search engine, and other
> features like searching inside files and for file names. The
> point is the real-time nature of it: the results you get
> correspond to exactly the contents of the filesystem at the time of
> the query (writes which occur _during_ a query are obviously
> not coherent with this, but writes which complete before the
> query, even immediately before, appear in the results).

Can be done with dnotify/inotify and a cache daemon keeping track of
mtime. Yes, this will need a kernel change to make sure mtime always
changed when the file changes, but it does not require anything else.

> 2. MP3 player scanning artists & titles:

Same.

> 3. Email program scanning for subject lines fast:

Same here.

> 4. Blog server caching built pages:
> 5. Programming environment scanning for tags:
> 6. File transfer program scanning for shared deltas.

And so on.

/Christer

--
"Just how much can I get away with and still go to heaven?"

Freelance consultant specializing in device driver programming for Linux
Christer Weinigel <christer@weinigel.se> http://www.weinigel.se