🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <86ke9r$a4p$1@scotsman.ed.ac.uk>, Adam Hamilton (ah) writes:

ah> Fair enough.  Dare I ask what IS sane, simple and obvious?
ah> A GUI?

A gui doesn't solve the problem, it's just a way to make an existing
bad solution less painful. I keep thinking directory hierachies have
had their day and we should stride out of the 60s into something new. 

If I knew what something new was I'd be building it of course.

An obvious approach would be to follow the database people. They left
hierachical DBs for relational ones. 

One noticable thing is that everything which has to do any non trivial
file access seems to end up implementing paths. You don't care where
the directories are, you want the machine to go look in lots of
reasonable places for the program/document/whatever you ask for, and
tha standard way to do that is to define a list of places to look.

Maybe a better solution is to throw away the hierachy (except perhaps
for system admin uses, tag all the directories with how likely they
are to contain the application (or whatever) you want and treat lookup
as a search. Eg, if I have a place where I put programs, a place where
we put CSTR programs, a place where we put random things we bring in
from outside and a few places for programs which came with the OS,
then rather than everyone having to maintain an explicit list, the
person who creates each one will have tagged it with `contains
executables, usefulness X'. Then when I ask to run `blugulate', the
system can go look starting from the place tagged most useful for
finding executables.

-- 
Mail me as rjc not spt@cstr.ed.ac.uk		_O_
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