a little (folish?) idea

[Joerg Sonnenberger]

On Tue, 14 Sep 2004 00:31:15 +0200, Martin P. Hellwig wrote:
> One sleepless night I wondered if it wouldn't be handy if I could create 
> a file which is ordinary in the sense that you can edit it with vi or 
> whatever tool of your choice, but behind the scene is actually a view on 
> a database.
> And I mean this quite literal in the sense that it's not like a cron job 
> which checks if the files are still the same, but more in the way of a 
> “server side” push.
> So that after the write on the edited file , the changes (after an 
> optional sanity check) are updated in the database.
> Other views change and so do the other “view-textfiles” who depend on 
> the same (shared) table/data.

That's kind of what Reiser implemented in reiser4. I don't like the idea
because it places a lot of burden on the system.

> Well that would be the administrative tasks, the real challenge would be 
> to create a certain framework which makes this possible.

The opposite direction, moving all the stuff into a tree and querying that
has been taken in the past multiple times. Good examples are supposedly
netinfo (from Next/MacOSX) and LDAP. Bad examples include the Windows
registry.

Joerg