[dale_glass]

There were grandiose plans indeed! Including things like plugins, yes, and ideas like exposing metadata about files (like MP3 artist tags and such) in virtual files. You'd `cat song.mp3/artist` or some such, treating the file as a virtual directory.

There also was weird artwork to go with all of that:

http://web.archive.org/web/20070219175315/http://www.namesys...

[coldpie]

> There also was weird artwork to go with all of that

Wow! You weren't kidding. Those really are something else.

[mark_undoio]

I really liked the files-as-directories behaviour. One of the objections I recall from the time was that this sort of behaviour would make more sense at VFS level.

I'd love to have this sort of functionality available (ISTR it has potentially other useful properties - e.g. new properties / metadata attached to files can automagically be handled by things like tar).

My memory says that concerns around overlapping file and directory behaviour caused pushback here. I think being able to hardlink to a directory was the issue (if every file can be a directory then how do you avoid directory cycles) but I may be mangling the details.

[selfhoster11]

Somewhat related, Minio now supports serving files from within ZIP archives. So that same song.mp3 could be accessed by opening the URL http://minio/files.zip/song.mp3. By treating the ZIP file as a virtual directory, you can access individual files within it without downloading the entire archive.

[trasz]

FWIW, this was eventually implemented in Solaris - that's how named data streams work.