The BeOS file system, an OS geek retrospective

Re:The BeOS file system, an OS geek retrospective by gigatexal on Friday July 06, 2018 @02:19AM (#17469349)

Having never played with BeOS but dabbled with Haiku — the richness of the BeOS filesystem would have won me over in a heart beat. Imagine if Microsoft bought them and then actually shipped a proper reFS that had the same richness? Or if Apple had — meh, Apple should have just paid Oracle the license fees and licensed ZFS. Or co-opted openZFS (not sure if that’s possible either, legally).

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Re:The BeOS file system, an OS geek retrospective by jacobolus on Friday July 06, 2018 @03:15AM (#17469575)

Apple hired the author of BeFS to work for them. He has worked on Spotlight, Time Machine, Apple's file systems, etc. http://www.nobius.org/dbg/

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Re:The BeOS file system, an OS geek retrospective by peatmoss on Friday July 06, 2018 @12:14PM (#17472592)

The one thing that I never saw make the leap from BeOS to other operating systems in a meaningful way was the "an application is a thin wrapper around a directory of metadata-enriched files" model that BeOS did.

I think the mail application and the media player were largely built this way because Be needed to build a handful of demonstration applications quickly and cheaply. On the other hand, I remember thinking how nice it was that email and multimedia behaved like the file browser with all its search and filtering features.

iTunes always felt like the exact antithesis of the BeOS model. It was a heavyweight application that had its own interaction model and idiosyncrasies. It might as well have been its own OS by comparison.

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Re:The BeOS file system, an OS geek retrospective by jacobush on Friday July 06, 2018 @04:24AM (#17469829)

Maybe that is why macOS has a similar way to access files by ID instead of by path?

The .vol directory: http://www.westwind.com/reference/os-x/invisibles.html

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Re:The BeOS file system, an OS geek retrospective by m_eiman on Friday July 06, 2018 @06:42AM (#17470330)

I think that's a legacy from MacOS Classic, where there was a way of keeping a handle to a file that was independent of the file's name (so you'd still point at the same file even if it was renamed).

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Re:The BeOS file system, an OS geek retrospective by memsom on Friday July 06, 2018 @07:59AM (#17470679)

You might find the file handle stuff comes from the fact that a lot of the Be employees were originally Mac developers at the start, and quite possibly because they wanted to support some of the features that were in the OFS (original File System, the Database like file system BeOS originally shipped with right up to the AA/PR1 releases. DR8.x definitely had the old file system.)

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Re:The BeOS file system, an OS geek retrospective by m_eiman on Monday July 09, 2018 @04:40AM (#17488774)

I remember reading some BeOS API documentation where it said something like "paths are UNIX-like, entry_refs are MacOS-like and they each have some pros and cons". Can't find it now, though…

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