[Thunar-dev] Spatial or not-spatial?

[Benedikt Meurer]

Jari Rahkonen wrote:
>> Ok, this needs clearance. The analogy is correct, maybe I made a 
>> mistake while translating it to english. The whole point in the 
>> analogy is the ever increasing amount of data. With the WWW people 
>> have already realized that a query-interface is needed (tho, these 
>> interfaces aren't perfect yet, *IMHO*), but with filesystems, people 
>> keep on fighting for their treeviews.
>>
> I'm sorry to butt in, but I'm a bit confused. You're right in that
> the amount of data is increasing in both the web and modern
> filesystems, but that seems to me to be the only major similarity
> between the two.

Its the only similarity we are interested in. You can compare other 
aspects of WWW and local file systems, but that won't probably help in 
discussion of Thunar.

> I search the web to find data. I search my file system to locate
> a certain file or to find certain types of files.

I dunno about your files, but usually files contain data and thats their 
whole purpose *IMHO*, so it doesn't matter if data is contained in a 
local file or a webpage, its just the data that you are interested in 
not the container.

> I don't search
> my filesystem very often because I usually know where I've stored
> my files, or at least where in my filesystem I should look for
> them. When it comes to the web this is rarely true.

You don't always use google on the WWW either, but sometimes enter an 
URL directly because you know the location.

> To me the internet seems more like a whopping large directory with
> a myriad of everchanging files than a hierarchical filesystem tree,
> so I can't help but feel that this analogy of yours seems quite
> artificial.

Lets drop that analogy then, and keep the point that the amount of data 
on the user's file systems is ever increasing.

> And the fact that the latest screenshot you posted
> seems exactly like what Brian's proposing confuses me even more.
> Please don't take offense, I'm mostly just trying to clarify
> things for myself.

Don't ask me...

> BTW if the screenshot looks anything like what thunar will
> be, I'm already sold. That's exactly what I've been looking
> for.

It'll most probably look similar to the prototype on the recent 
screenshots. The design draft on the wiki will tell you more about this.

> - Jari

Benedikt