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by Overdr0ne 1838 days ago
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.