Re: [Relfs-devel] RelFS usage.

[Vincenzo C. <ci...@di...>]

> After creating one more set of scripts for RelFS, I decided to post it
> here

Ok I am almost back. Will be completely back after a couple of
deadlines. You are welcome posting scripts, I will soon create an
"utils" directory with shell scripts to do ordinary stuff, even though I
think we should write some simple GUI, after stabilizing about the kind
of common relfs usage.

> , as it gives easy interface (too simplistic, but yet more than a
> standard search in file managers would give) to create search directory,
> where will be found all files which satisfy condition (I count symbolic
> links as files).

I still haven't been able to study your scripts in detail, but I have
some preliminary comments and many questions:

1. I don't like the "_create_" scripts that add things to a schema,
would rather prefer to have a state in relfs where it scans for new
addons, and when it finds them, it runs initialization code. This state
should be entered at least on startup, or better when a certain
directory containing plugins is changed. Your tags table can be at right
considered a plugin for relfs, even though there is no indexing. This
can be a good addition for a next snapshot of relfs.

2. Can you explain the schema of "tags"? Why are there (path,filename)
pairs? Didn't the id suffice to find the file name? Why did you prefer
to introduce a "tag_value"? I always think of tags as boolean
attributes, not quantities, even if the second idea is more general and
can be useful to implement classification directories, it seems harder
to use for navigation. In your case, you list all the values as
subdirectories of a tag, aren't them tags in their own right then? In
fact a tag name already can contain slashes, so the two namespaces
"tag/value" and "tag" already overlap, don't them? Finally, what's the
meaning of tag_id? Could "id, tag" be used as a primary key for the
table?

3. What's the _uniquedata_ stuff for?

4. What's the symlinkize_dir script? Maybe we already talked about that
in the past.

5. How should relfs_search_text be used?

> PS. On the site it is stated that I learned OCaml for this project. That
> is not entirely true - I didn't learn it well, and I knew some basics
> before. But I think that I more than doubled my skill in OCaml.
> 

Oops, fixed :) Thank you for your help with the project, I will surely
add an "util" directory with your scripts. We should agree a schema for
tags and the rest, and then also create some simple GUI to perform the
same operations as the scripts, dunno if in ocaml+gtk or in python.

Vincenzo