Forum Overview :: We Love Katamari :: Your brother has Is-ism

[quote name="Ray of Light"]Many people react as he did to WinFS and the (unfinished) version of ReserFS that made made Hans Reiser kill his wife: "whyever would I want my files in a database?!" The trick is to view the <i>current</i> setup as a primitive database with just one freeform field (filename) and one other, very constrained field (full path)*. Then, it is easy to realize that a first-class database is a superset of the existing paradigm, and that it removes many limitations whose original justification (paucity of compute resources) no longer exists. Your brother can thank me by never implementing "skinning" until the product is feature complete and largely bugfree. * Ironically enough, NTFS does provide extra fields, including the ones you want (Title, Category, Keywords; all modifiable via the Summary tab of the File Properties dialog), but there are weird restrictions on when you're allowed to have them, the tools for manipulating them are primitive or expensive, and there are many ways to lose them (sending the files to a foreign FS is one, using third-party copiers and archivers is another) but no easy way to restore them. In my experience, people who incorporate these fields into their workflow come to regret it. Some have had success with a userland metadata store (database or DESCRIPT.ION/.DS_Store-type thing) and regularly pushing its contents into NTFS metadata for use by indexers).[/quote]