The libferris
virtual filesystem project now provides a yum
repository
for installation on Fedora Core 5 machines. With libferris you can mount PostgreSQL, XML, db4 files as a filesystem
and also expose it to all applications using ferrisfuse. Extensive support for indexing and searching
ferris filesystems is also available in the binary packages.
What can I say but WOW. This is really something, and if we can get a gui (or something like a konqueror ioslave) that works just like the ferris* utils, it could be huge.
Unix’s “everything is a file” is taken to a new plane with this.
I guess I can close my mouth now.
I’ve been thinking about this for a while. BeOS’ lovely “Meta” filesystem, the now discontinued WinFS, MacOS Spotlight, even Beagle on Unix… You might say they’re long overdue (and they were!), but why hasn’t anyone mentioned PICK, yet?
It seems like the 00’s is more about (finally) reapplying past inventions.
Even Common Lisp is having a come-back!