[infogulch]

It's not about relations, it's about schemas and types. My complaint is that none of the schemas and types are communicated by the OS in an explicit, uniform, programmatic way.

Everything in 'special' mounted filesystems like procfs, sys, cgroupsv2, etc as a start. These all use implicit schemas of particularly named files with particular contents that you have to learn about out-of-band to just to do anything.

Requirement 1: Everything has an inspectable schema.

All the configuration files with their own home-grown format that you can only validate by restarting the program that relies on it and hoping that it doesn't crash your system is for the birds.

Requirement 2: Files that must have a particular format must also have a well-defined Type that can be validated to be correct in a uniform way outside the program that uses it.