[Vimoutliner] graphs/trees

[Peter Princz]

Scott,

On 23/10/06, Scott Scriven <vimoutliner at toykeeper.net> wrote:
> * Peter Princz <princzp at gmail.com> wrote:
> > See them here:
> > http://princzp.googlepages.com/vimoutliner
>
> So, under the "limits" section, you mention wanting to represent
> graphs instead of strict trees.
>
> That's something I've given a lot of thought to over the past 5-6
> years, and I'm about to start work on a fifth prototype
> filesystem designed for this kind of thing.
>
> Basically, I've been looking for a filesystem which represents a
> directed graph instead of a tree.  So, it's still hierarchic, but
> instead of each node having one parent and multiple children, it
> would be multiple parents and multiple children.  It's like
> hierarchic labels or tags, built into the filesystem.
>
> If reiserfs4 allowed this, I'd have a good basis for building
> apps.  But POSIX forbids multiple hardlinks to directories, and
> has no decent way to "ls" parents, so I'm stuck using more custom
> storage to represent the graph.
>
> While it's a really neat idea and I'm interested in building it,
> I don't see this sort of thing being feasible in VO.  Since it's
> primarily a text editor, using plaintext storage, it seems
> like graphs would be very difficult and kludgy to implement.
>
> OTOH, VO almost makes me want to write v2 of my old outliner
> program.  VO has incredible text-editing capabilities, but it's
> fairly weak on the actual tree manipulation.  It would be nice to
> have something more like a hierarchic database, where each node
> can have its own unique set of attributes.  But I don't know how
> much I would actually use something like that, so I doubt I'll
> write it.  VO is arguably more useful most of the time, even if
> it is just a folding text editor with some macros and export
> plugins.
>
>

supporting an important feature down to filesystem level is a
brilliiant idea, I enceourage you to elaborate on that. Version
control was once built into VMS, regarded as the best ever OS by many
old folks. Also one of the success factors behind Unix is how they map
almost every concept to files and provides efficient tools to
manipulate files. Soft- and hard links on unix (shortcuts on windows)
is a nice try to abstract from trees to graphs there. So don't give
up. :)

Particularly reiserfs has clouded future now, that its author has been
arrested and also Novell has dropped it.

Have a nice day,
  Peter

-- 
Keep cool. Develop in total darkness.