Re: [Relfs-devel] New RelFS prototype, with query ability - and binary release

[Jasper v. de G. <th....@hc...>]

Vincenzo Ciancia wrote:
> Many, many things have changed since the last relfs prototype!
> 
> I didn't want to annunce anything until I'd have the time to solve the
> tons of problems I had both with ocamlfuse and relfs. Now that I have
> reached a stable development state, here I am - asking again for
> request for enhancements, and advice for use cases you would like to
> work in relfs.
> 
> It's so rare to have a developer asking for "requests" that you can't miss
> this great chance! Talk to us about your user data indexing problems!

I've been exploring some ideas similar to relfs lately and one of the 
most obnoxious problems I haven't been able to get around is what to do 
with identical filenames in one directory. Traditionally this simply 
isn't allowed, which is workable because it's very clear what other 
files are in the directory. As soon as you introduce some kind of 
query-like directories this becomes a nightmare though, as it's hardly 
realistic to force people to use completely unique names for each file 
and dynamically renaming files is also less than ideal.

Of course this can be solved by creating some new unique attribute which 
programs can use, but old programs won't know how to. And if you turn it 
around (use some unique id for the actual filename and expose the 
non-unique "filename" as some new attribute), which I would probably 
prefer, old programs will work but will probably look quite ugly 
(although it would be possible to make sure that the unique id looks as 
much like the "filename" as possible).

In short, I can think of some solutions, but none of them seem perfect 
and I was wondering what other people's thoughts on this were.