I'm not sure what problems you mean here, the only thing I can think of is your reference to symlinks turning a tree structure into a graph but I'd say that's a solution, not a problem.

Because the symlinks make your tree not really a tree anymore, but all the tools available want it to be a tree and often need modifications when symlinks enter the picture. For instance, should tar get the data from the symlinked file or make an entry for the symlink in the archive? The answer depends on various circumstances that cannot be coded into tar itself. The best tar can do is let the human operator decide.

Symlinks are useful and often necessary to express certain relationships in the filesystem. But the reason they are there is that almost everything outside of acadamia sees the file system as a tree and won't accept much else. They are a hack for a poor datastructure. A useful and necessary hack, but a hack. We'd do much better if we had filesystems that operated as a generalized set instead of a strict tree.

"There is no shame in being self-taught, only in not trying to learn in the first place." -- Atrus, Myst: The Book of D'ni.

In reply to Re^4: RFC: Fuse::DBI - mount database as filesystem by hardburn
in thread RFC: Fuse::DBI - mount database as filesystem by dpavlin

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