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Comment by mnzaki | Hacker News Reader

I was excited about this at first, but I have come to think a filesystem that does away with the tree structure would be rather difficult to deal with or get used to. I will probably end up with loads of files under similar tags and it would make files rather difficult to locate due to the sheer number of them. Maybe the idea just needs a bit of refining?

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This is actually something I've been wanting for a long, long time. Obviously I'm not planning on using this for / or anything system-related, but for my media archives &c it's perfect. Taking movies for example, I've found most people I know think an alphabetical approach is the way to go. This is useless, however, if I don't know what I want to watch. With the tags I can easily take tag in genres, directors, actors, etc and have my filesystem help me choose a film.

There is on major thing that I've considered would be an awesome addition to a system like this: automatic tagging from the metadata. It'd be awesome if my movies automatically got tagged by, say, resolution and length, so I wouldn't have to bother with such things.

Same here, I want something similar to manage my photo collection. The current implementation actually can have plugins that act on specific file types, so automatic tags are just a few lines of code away.

But then what advantage would this system have over a dedicated media manager or the several semantic desktop projects? The only advantage I see is allowing traditional tools (unix utilities, conventional file managers, even 'open file' popups) to take advantage of the system without any extra effort on their side. Though wouldn't dedicated tools, say a full blown semantic desktop, allow for much better integration and usability?

That really depends on the use case, I guess. For me, the use case is that I've got a media server in my living room and, in addition to being hooked up to my TV, it also has a Samba share set up so that anyone in my apartment can watch/listen/look at/read/view anything anywhere in the apartment. In this case, it certainly would be possible to have every computer set up with a semantic desktop setup, but I'm still trying to keep my Eee minimal and visitors wouldn't necessarily be set up with the semantic desktop tools.

Maybe this implies ground for a semantic server, but I'm inclined to think that Samba (or your favourite mostly-transparent sharing protocol) on top of a tag-based system is actually a good and way to accomplish this particular use case.

> The only advantage I see is allowing traditional tools (unix utilities, conventional file managers, even 'open file' popups) to take advantage of the system without any extra effort on their side.

That's a pretty big advantage.

Tagsistant already supports automatic tagging from the metadata such as you have described. The linked article says it supports plugins that can “extract tags from file contents” in the second-to-last paragraph. So if you want to tag your movies the way you said, you just have to write a plugin that uses some library to extract that data, or wait for someone else to release a plugin like that.

Yeah, I didn't notice that on first read, but that definitely helps seal the deal for me. I'll probably set it up on my server tonight and at least look into hacking together that plugin.

I think just a bit of refining may be required. The filesystem would probably come with a few tags already, so there's less chance of confusing the basic ones. With an easy-to-use tag manager that keeps track of all the extant tags, and the ability to do batch operations across all tags, I think it would work fine. The tricky part will be integrating with systems used to hierarchical directories.

Instead of having operators like AND be path components, I would have the path separator itself be an and operator, or use & and | to just make logical expressions. As long as you're throwing out the hierarchy, you may as well throw out the hierarchical syntax.

Having operators be part of the path itself actually struck me as genius. This way tagfs is 'backwards compatible' with current file managers and you can 'browse' the filesystem quite naturally. Having the operators as path separators would require changes to the filemanagers and the host of tools we already use to work with our filesystems.

Yeah, it'll be be hard to integrate in existing systems, one way or another. Thanks for your compliment.

Oh, never mind, I see what you mean.

Based on what was mentioned in the article, the 'refining' you mention might well be a plug in. Tagging anything can be a significant task---tagging many 'anythings' creates problems of scale. Another thing to consider; if this is in place at the beginning of the information cycle, I suspect that it would be easier than if this is used to convert from older approaches. Still for all of that, interesting idea/work.

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