unity-design team mailing list archive

["frederik.nnaji@xxxxxxxxx" <frederik.nnaji@xxxxxxxxx>]

Thanks for the excellent material guys!
While this work was mainly about folders and not about files, i've been able
to extract some insights, that might be of relevant to this thread..

On Wed, Nov 24, 2010 at 01:14, Kevin Godby <godbyk@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

>
> You can (freely) download a PDF of this paper from
> <
> https://digital.lib.washington.edu/dspace/bitstream/handle/1773/2031/Don%27t%20take%20my%20folders%20away,%20current.pdf?sequence=2
> >.
>
>
above document portrays folder hierarchies as an independent type of
information, right beside "files", "folders" and "meta information"..
This means ultimately:
A hierarchy presents a tree structure mapping of simple object
relationships..

Tree structures are used all over nature and science to present simple
relationships.
But they can't present how two subprojects merge back into one.

Folders allow for the presentation of simple object relationships:
* serial inheritance (breadcrumbs)
* affiliation ("inside" and "outside" a folder)

In order to fix the problem with folder merging mentioned above, a subfolder
would have to be able to appear within multiple conatining folders
simultaneously, as far as our archaic tree view is concerned.
Imagine having several simultaneous hardlinks to a file/folder, that should
nearly describe it to some of the CLI veterans on this list ;)

To see what a tree looks like, some of us might wanna try a "sudo apt-get
install tree" and a subsequent "tree -d" afterwards..
That was very refreshing to me.

We'll be "fileless", once we allow for a more advanced way of merging
branches of tree folders with both automatic and customizable selection
routines(filters).

thoughts, comments, criticism?