Re: dbus and GNOME 2.8

[Jody Goldberg <jody gnome org>]

On Mon, Apr 05, 2004 at 07:24:37PM -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.

There is no 'essentially' the OLE2 format _is_ a file system
internally.

> 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.

I'm somewhat leary of this.  It will play havoc (no insult intended)
with backward compatibility.  Newly generated files/resource-forks
will be inaccessible to older machines.  At this point we're
currently faced with two options with good tool support
    - zip/jar : poor seek support
    - ole2 : damn ugly internally, but decent performance

It should also be noted that neither these, nor any db is going to
make data instantly more accessibil or shareable.  We're only
discussing a _container_ format.  The structure of the content and
even parts of the content itself will need to be standardized for
this to be truely useful.  Which is why MS included it's property
set api and format as part of OLE.