I’ve been always interested in File Systems. Mostly the history. Can you believe that I wrote a technical paper in college comparing the current file systems of the day? (No, you don’t want to read it, trust me).
Here’s a blog article that links to a history comparison and some other great little tidbits of info. (A Google file system? wow) Not a lot of histoical info about the linux side of things though. He said he couldn’t find any. Anyone got some info they want to share?
There seems to be a very slow trend toward using file systems as databases. Right now the best we can get is sorting a directory by metadata, which is pretty snazzy, but some folks itch at the possibilities of a more general data store. But normally, if you want specialized database functionality, you go to the specialized tools and web backends. But perhaps there’s a happy medium for some applications - instead of drooling over some sort of relational database model, start with some hierarchical indexing, and build an Explorer plugin to browse MP3s as if they were files and file groups. This overlays well on existing file systems as long as you have metadata, and allows an actual nice tool instead of some generalized mess. Or, since the functionality is so nice, I’ll just continue using iTunes. Same with email.