Comments on: tag(1): del.icio.us-style file tagging

By: Stephen

Stephen — Sat, 24 Jun 2006 04:04:50 +0000

@Tommi: Thanks for the reference. I’ll try to check it out in the next few weeks. — Stephen

By: Tommi Virtanen

Tommi Virtanen — Sat, 17 Jun 2006 17:04:16 +0000

For an actual filesystem that did this, see

http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/gifford91semantic.html

By: Stephen

Stephen — Sun, 17 Jul 2005 04:12:07 +0000

@Claire: Actually fighting with making MathML work kept me up late, but thanks.

@Thrax: The subdirectories contain links to the files that match both the tag of the current directory and the tag of each subdirectory. That is, they contain the two-tag matches. The subdirectories of those subdirectories are the three-tag matches, and so forth. tag(1) makes the subdirectories based on the set of tags on each file; adding a tag can create additional directories, while deleting a tag may cause the removal of directories (if that was the last use of the tag). Don't rename the tag directories! This operation needs to be added to tag(1) to be safe: the tag sets of each file with the given tag (to be renamed) need to be updated as well.

— Stephen

By: Thrax

Thrax — Sat, 16 Jul 2005 21:18:30 +0000

I don't understand why there are subdirectories in the tag directories? What's in those? How does Tag know when to make them?

I can see it would be handy with pipes, like %tag print_me|lpr And I guess renaming a tag would be easy when browsing the tag directory. I hear Flickr has introduced 'for:person' tags. Seems like a slippery slope to complexity.

By: Claire Giordano

Claire Giordano — Sat, 16 Jul 2005 08:24:55 +0000

Very, very cool, Stephen. So this is what keeps you up late at night.