ubuntu-phone team mailing list archive

[Matt Richardson <m.richardson.1990@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi David,

As someone who has worked with the "tags" vs "files and folders" problem
quite a lot I can imagine your insights would be very interesting to hear
I completely agree with the difference in needs between applications and
humans and I agree that the tag system should not replace the
folder/files system, merely be a different way of browsing it.

I would be very interested in hearing more about your implementation of
the tags system and about the problems you have faced. I really think
that with a relatively clean slate ubuntu-touch might offer a fantastic
platform to explore this idea and an access point to expand it to the
rest of the ubuntu platform.

I would also like to hear more from other users about how they feel
about the idea. How have your users responded to it?

Thanks,
Matt


On 25/02/13 09:19, David Jordan wrote:
> As someone who has worked with the "tags" vs "files and folders"
> problem quite a lot via the Novacut project, I thought I should chime
> in here.
>
> The problem with the traditional files and folders system is that it
> conflates two very different concepts, location and description. 
> Applications need to know where a file is in order to work with it,
> while humans need a readable description of the file in order to
> understand what it contains and how it relates to other files.  The
> problem with tradtional file systems is the same hierarchical
> structure is used for both purposes, and this can become a problem
> when the user's understanding of a file or set of files changes over time.
>
> Human understanding of what particular files mean and how they're
> interelated can and will change over time.  And if you've strongly
> coupled location with description like we tend to do with traditional
> file systems, that means the location changes and all the
> interconnections between files break if the description is ever updated.
>
> If I start a new project, I might start it out with a given working
> title or perhaps no title at all because it started with just a flurry
> of writing at 2 in the morning.  I can change it later.  This is fine
> as long as nothing else relies on being able to find that particular
> set of files, but say I had needed to use some bits of it in another
> program, suddenly I'm either locked into all the assumptions I'd made
> about file structure or I have to start forking separate copies into a
> bunch of different places. 
>
> Fortunately, we don't have to ditch all the great work on file systems
> that has been done already.  They do work great for storing and
> locating files.  What we have to do is let the user find and interact
> with their files without caring about exactly where they are in the
> hierarchy or what their true name is. 
>
> The way Novacut handles this is through a database that keeps track of
> its set of files and stores metadata about them.  Every file has a
> unique ID in the system and even though files are read-only in our
> system, it's quite trivial to indicate relations between the raw files
> with metadata, so applications can simply point to the most up to date
> version of something. 
>
> While we probably shouldn't hide the underlying file system from the
> user, I do think a way to search and organize one's files based on
> metadata rather than traditional folder hierarchies and file names is
> a great idea.  Moreover, applications should be able to relate to
> files using either the traditional route or through unique
> location-independent identifiers.
>
> David Jordan
>
>
> On Sun, Feb 24, 2013 at 5:06 PM, Matt Richardson
> <m.richardson.1990@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
> <mailto:m.richardson.1990@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>> wrote:
>
>     Since Ubuntu-Touch is a new system we have a potential to replace
>     files/folders with tags.
>
>     1) Why?
>     Tags offer a much more flexible file management system than
>     files/folders because they allow a single file to exist in
>     multiple locations, without the use of symlinks.
>
>     2) To tackle the obvious issue: The current filesystem and
>     operating system are built on the folder/files system, as are
>     almost all existing applications.
>     The idea of the tag based system would not be to replace the
>     folder/files system as far as the system is concerned, merely to
>     hide it in day to day use.
>     My idea would be that the tags would operate as follows:
>
>         When saving/creating a file any number of tags can be selected
>         as well as a name. By default the 'username' tag would be
>         selected.
>         The actual filesystem would place the file in
>         /home/username/tag1/tag2/
>         Tags beyond tag 2 would not be included in the folder
>         hierarchy. A database (similar to zeitgeist) would also be
>         updated to contain the full list of tags and files
>         When selecting files (file manager or open dialog) all of the
>         available tags would be listed. When a tag is selected, the
>         list updates to show tags which contain files matching the
>         first tag
>         In order to show root files the "system" tag would have to be
>         selected. The file manager would then switch to standard
>         file/folder view, since we can't easily update the root filesystem
>
>     Hopefully that all makes sense
>
>     Thoughts?
>
>     Thanks,
>     Matt
>
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