[tahoe-dev] up with filesystems! up with the web!
James A. Donald
jamesd at echeque.com
Fri Jan 1 20:21:07 PST 2010
Chimpy McSimian IV, Esq. wrote:
> > If anything, it sounds like you should stick with exposing a tree
> > structure to users.
David-Sarah Hopwood wrote:
> This would be incompatible with supporting fine-grained sharing
Sharing is typically browsing. Browsing arbitrary graphs is fine.
Manipulating arbitrary graphs is not fine.
Most manipulation tools should manipulate a tree. If a tree is being
manipulated, then what is displayed to be manipulated, or as the results
of manipulation, must also be a tree.
Windows explorer (a browse and tree manipulation tool) displays three
kinds of things in a directory: Folders, shortcuts, and files.
Shortcuts and folders form an arbitrary graph, folders form a tree,
files are leaf nodes of the current folder. When manipulating,
shortcuts are treated as leaves, so one always manipulates a tree, even
though one browses an arbitrary graph.
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