Structured storage? (was Re: dbus and GNOME 2.8)

[Maciej Stachowiak <mjs noisehavoc org>]

On 05Apr2004 07:24PM (-0400), Robert Love wrote:
>
> What the goal of Storage, WinFS, etc. is is to decouple the data from
> the structure of the file.  Right now, complex data formats essentially
> recreate file system structure inside of each file.  The filesystem
> should be the ultimate storage medium.  To realize this, and have
> everything-as-a-file and one-thing-per-file, we need a much smarter
> filesystem.  WinFS can natively understand complex concepts such as
> "address book entries" in a very simple and clean way, because the file
> system itself implements structure and typing.

Historically, operating systems that provided more structured
filesystems lost out to simple byte-oriented approaches. In a large
part I think this is due to the increasing popularity of networking
and the resultant fact that, ultimately, you will have to interchange
octet streams. Thus, ultimately you must standardize what the raw data
looks like, and be able to get at the raw data.

I do not see how the new trend towards structured storage avoids this
failure, especially since every operating environment seems on track
to grow it's own incompatible approach.

Regards,
Maciej