News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on The End of Files: the biggest revolution since the GUI?. Parent comment

Re:The End of Files: the biggest revolution since the GUI? by afandian on Tuesday October 22, 2013 @06:00AM (#6590741)
+1 insightful

Microsoft has been trying something like this for decades with WinFS (for 'this' read 'a richer persistence abstraction offered by the OS').

It never quite happened.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinFS#Development

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:The End of Files: the biggest revolution since the GUI? by greyfade on Tuesday October 22, 2013 @01:46PM (#6593561)
I've always thought that that effort had value, even if it is a failure.

I think BeOS had something going right when BeFS was introduced with indexed extended attributes. Tagging and other metadata are exceedingly useful, so why isn't anyone working on a native tagging filesystem with indexed extended attributes? That would go a long way to making the likes of WinFS a reality.

Even more useful is if we find a way to standardize the communication of these additional metadata, to make the tags and attributes more portable.

[ Parent | on HN ]