[Overdr0ne]

Yeah, not a fan of recursive directory trees. Sysfs for example is pretty wonky esp when you're searching for some specific attribute of the device. Not hard links or real files ftm, but same idea. Hard linked directories breaks the category system.

Now the same name for a different inode in two directories is a point well taken, but I would argue that does not fully describe the inode, that name is just one component of the metadata for that file. People are just so unaware of all that other metadata because the interface rarely shows it to them. So many people have taken to packing all that data into the filename. Version numbers, code names- it's one way to achieve portability i guess, but what an ugly compromise! And with all the virtual environments now for pythons and such, it's quite easy to find yourself using the wrong version of something if you don't really know what you're doing and just look at the filename.

Hard linking links all that metadata, which of course does include that unique ID that open returns, so I think it's okay. I would just like to see our file interfaces more adapted to showing all that important metadata in a comfier way

[dredmorbius]

The same name / different inodes problem isn't a filesystem issue, it's a tools issue. Specifically, the fact that tools which modify files (editors, shells, archival utilities, scripting languages, any random executable) only see the local filehandle, not the fact that it's "supposed" to be a single chained copy across multiple directories.

There might be some way to muck around with that using attributes (at least in theory, I don't know of any that do this now), but presently, the only way to accomplish this is through workflow and integrity-checking systems (e.g., that "filename" at any of numerous specified points should be identical to and/or a hardlink of a specified canonical source).

Oh, and one more: since hardlinks apply only to a single filesystem, any cross-filesystem references are impossible.

I think you also end up with issues in almost all cases of networked filesystems: NFS, SSHFS, etc.

[Overdr0ne]

Sorry, I was sick yesterday.

It is mostly a tools problem. It should be way easier than it is to see the metadata for a given file in your shell command, browser or whatever. Dired for example has a pretty darn good visual model for this, that could really be taken much further I think. The reason we don't see more metadata like extended attributes and such, is that they are still not standardized across different file systems. So we get left with the lowest common denominator. But a reasonably designed system could just show it if it's there.

I've just always thought a tree is a very elegant way to represent categorical data. Now that I think of it, placing files in the tree is a way to preindex a search for all objects in a given category, basically the ls command. It really affects how we reason about our data. Huh.

Soft links honestly seem like a hack to me, to get around our shitty distributed file system model. And then, because oh no, what if my file is on another server, I guess everyone should just use soft links for absolutely everything. Like, why not just concatenate the host string to the file ID, and have the OS figure out how to handle it? Sorta like tramp.