[ajsalminen]

It doesn't seem entirely fair to say it stems from "marketing". There were and still are plenty of fully functional applications that rely on the filesystem attributes and indexing on BeOS/Haiku.

Attributes are exposed on the UI level and can be a useful way to organize custom structured data even for an end user: https://www.haiku-os.org/docs/userguide/en/workshop-filetype...

I'm sure it is way more limited than some original failed vision but limiting scope doesn't have to be a bad thing and I think what they ended up with does live up to the hype in some ways. That said, it certainly also has some flaws like not even being able to efficiently use the index for the built-in file find dialog because of case insensitivity.

[memsom]

No - it was marketing. The older Filesystem was a full on database and would allow the user to do all kinds of weird and wonderful things with metadata. But the Filesystem interface in BeOS prior to PR1 (well, technically AA) made it almost a herculean feat to interface an external non native file system to the OS.

BFS was written in a way that complied to a file system API that could then support other non-BFS file systems being plugged in. But because it was written in more of a traditional file system way, the database features got massively cut down to just attributes and indexes with live queries. It was a trade off. The database hype built by the DR releases (mainly for BeBox, I think only one made it publicly to Mac) was maintained because the attributes sort of mimicked the bare minimum functionality needed to tick a marketing box. But BFS really doesn't do much more than some other file systems have since done.

The OFS was more like the SQLServer based WinFS that Longhorn was going to have.

[ajsalminen]

Well, I probably haven't seen the marketing you're referring to if it all happened before even that prerelease but people have kept talking about the BFS features for decades now and the interest is certainly not all based on some early marketing.

Yes it is a trade off. Not sure what other file systems you are referring to but I'm not aware of any others that enable the kind of applications BeOS had using these features. Those are also a key part of it.