Ideas for changes to Unix filesystem

[Barry Shein]

Actually, I'm going to take exception with all these old fuddy-duddies
who seem to be defending the status quo and say that the idea of
manipulating blocks within a file is perfectly rational and would be
useful. I don't know why everyone seems to think it's a wild idea.

Think of fixed length record files and inserting into them, it would
be nice to be able to just copy/munge the block numbers rather than
the data.

You'd need operators for inserting and deleting, perhaps one function
could do both (who cares, two functions, or one with flags, easy
enough to use flags.) Moving blocks around (e.g. a sort) would be
handy also.

Of course, you could do most of this virtually (although really
freeing space is a problem) by just writing an application library
which goes through a block table.

I suppose the obvious suggestion would be to try writing and putting
such a library into common use and seeing if it gets used.

Personally, I'd be more interested in a meta-file format where you can
create files which point into other files, a file-type made up of an
(offset, length) tuple list. The hard part is reference counts. But it
is the file system equivalent of a database "view". I could think of
many uses for that, and its operators (e.g. hypertext.)
-- 
        -Barry Shein

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