Re: [opensuse] Beagle frontend
Osamalamadingdong wrote:
Brian K. White wrote:
John Andersen wrote:
Adam Tauno Williams wrote:
On Tue, 2009-07-14 at 15:52 +0100, Peter Nikolic wrote:
On Tuesday 14 Jul 2009 14:53:02 Adam Tauno Williams wrote:
>> Disabling Beagle is well covered at >> Lets face it beagle is nothing more than an excuse for a poorly organised filing system not on the machines behalf but on the side of the user No, you are wrong.
, IF the user was to have a sensible way of creating storing and sorting his files in the first place there would be no need for the unmitigated resource hog in the first place it just allows people to be lax and untidy so there is no reason for it to be installed there is on the other hand a need to teach people to organise the machines .
And what 'organized' filesystem will let me see related IMs, documents, web content, e-mail, and contact information in one view derived from a single action? None.
And why would anyone need that?
Peter was addressing filesystem organization, but he could just as well have been addressing organization of your life.
Do you routinely keep all of your possessions in a heap in the middle of the floor? If not, why do you maintain your files and your life this way?
What room or shelf would you put a knife in? The kitchen? Ok, but then what about the knife room? All the kitchen knives are missing from the knife collection room. And all the knives are missing from the cutting tools room because they're in the knife room and the kitchen, oh and the razors in the bathroom those are missing too, oh and the garden shears out in the shed... Dang, what about the room that contains all the things made out of brass? Where are all your batteries? In the battery room? Why not? Aren't you organized? Why are they scattered all around in your watches, remotes, clocks, flashlights, your car, your wireless mouse at your office...
A filesystem is a one-dimensional linear hierarchy and as such you can only use it to organize things by one single aspect per item. You have to choose one place for a document about oats , perhaps /research/chemistry/organic/food/oats/proteins.txt
links, either "hard" or "soft" (symbolic) completely eliminate that problem.
Entirely
100%
Laugh. Symlinks? Substitute for indexing and searching and keywords and property lists and/or rich metadata? I knew some idiot would attempt to assert that. I don't even know where to begin to point out the ignorance displayed by such a claim. Filsystem symlinks (or hard) do not provide the functionality of multi key indexing or a relational database. You would have to create an insane number of symlinks for every document in order to come close to even merely poorly faking the functionality of searching the document contents. And then for all your trouble you're left with an inflexible structure. You can't modify the document contents or it's main/real name without breaking all the symlinks if you change a filename or making some or all of the symlinks untrue if you change the contents. Far from allowing you to organize your content better, they just allow you to make a bigger hairier mess if you attempt to use them for a purpose they weren't designed for. A front-end program might be built on top of such a filesystem feature, but then, that's all beagle is in the first place is a front end way to locate files on a filesystem to do something the filesystem can't do by itself (excluding extremely recent ext4/reiser4 concepts that don't actually exist yet) Also, beagle and windows indexing are hardly the invention of this idea. apropos and locate have been around since ages. An awful lot of awfully smart people wasted an awful lot of time and energy writing apps to solve a problem that doesn't exist. This argument is like any other don't-need-the-new-tool argument. My trusty easy simple calculator works just fine so therefor spreadsheets were just a solution in search of a problem that doesn't exist. That's actually true for very simple tasks and small datasets. But only for that. If you even use a computer at all for anything it's stupid to have to explain this concept since you must have sometime had to justify the use of a computer for various tasks that can be done simpler (and less flexibly and not as well) without it. Just because not all new ideas are good doesn't mean that all new ideas are not good. 1.5 seconds of thought starts to show the validity of the idea of indexing content. It's been a problem since day one of computers. It's why databases were invented. Or do you claim that databases were also a solution in search of a problem that doesn't exist. I mean, hey, Symlinks! -- bkw -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org
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Brian K. White