Re: Things that Longhorn seems to be doing right

[Felipe Alfaro Solana <felipe_alfaro@linuxmail.org>]

On Thu, 2003-10-30 at 02:52, Theodore Ts'o wrote:
> Keep in mind that just because Windows does thing a certain way
> doesn't mean we have to provide the same functionality in exactly the
> same way.
> 
> Also keep in mind that Microsoft very deliberately blurs what they do
> in their "kernel" versus what they provide via system libraries (i.e.,
> API's provided via their DLL's, or shared libraries).
> 
> At some level what they have done can be very easily replicated by
> having a userspace database which is tied to the filesystem so you can
> do select statements to search on metadata assocated with files.  We
> can do this simply by associating UUID's to files, and storing the
> file metadata in a MySQL database which can be searched via
> appropriate userspace libraries which we provide.
> 
> Please do **not** assume that just because of the vaporware press
> releases released by Microsoft that (a) they have pushed an SQL Query
> optimizer into the kernel, or that (b) even if they did, we should
> follow their bad example and attempt to do the same.  
> 
> There are multiple ways of skinning this particular cat, and we don't
> need to blindly follow Microsoft's design mistakes.
> 
> Fortunately, I have enough faith in Linus Torvalds' taste that I'm not
> particularly worried what would happen if someone were to send him a
> patch that attempted to cram MySQL or Postgres into the guts of the
> Linux kernel....  although I would like to watch when someone proposes
> such a thing!

In fact, the GNOME taskforce is already working on something much like
the much-touted-but-nearly-inexistent WinFS. It's all done in userspace:

http://www.gnome.org/~seth/storage/index.html