26 Sep 2008 19:23

Today I spent another hour or two on working on tagfs (described in TagFs Idea). It's now pretty much usable. You can now:

• browse files with the tag-directory mapping
  • directory tag1/tag2/tag3 is the same as tag2/tag3/tag1 or tag3/tag1/tag2
• read/write files
  • file tag1/tag2/tag3/file is the same as tag2/tag3/tag1/file AND even tag2/tag1,tag3,file
  • tags are not only allowed as directory names, but also as comma-separated file prefix
• create new files
  • echo Some Content > tag1/tag2/some_file
  • echo Some Other Content > tag1/tag2,some_file
• files have all their "real" properties (owner, group, modification time — this is stored on the back-end filesystem)

Things to do yet:

• forbid creating a file with tags rendering some directory with name of existing file
  • example: you have tag1/great file
  • then you create a tag1/tag2,great,people.txt file
  • this way, you would have a great directory showing in the tag1 directory, because there is a file having both tag1 and great
  • you also have great file there, so you end up with a file and a directory (tag) of the same name
• scan and list files by their properties
  • file type — PDF, JPEG, HTML, …
  • EXIF tags for JPEG — date taken, camera info
  • ID3 tags for MP3 — artist, title, album
• improve directory listing
  • include SOME files in sub-directories if the sub-directories consist of small number of files
  • as a result we get a easily-browsable repository of files
• do some marketing
  • I would like to serve files from such a file system with FTP or Apache to let people feel the system

I think this experiment is really worth working on this.

In case you want to test the FS, drop me a note or comment.

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