I was reading this article:
http://cda.mrs.umn.edu/~mine0057/fs.pdf

and was blown away by some of the ideas presented. I'm no expert on filesystems, but the concepts presented here are really cool. The tagging of MP3 section is pretty cool - I wonder if that could be imlpemented on the empeg easily. ??

I'd have to agree with some to most of the article, but the fact that about 2/5 of it specifically refer to GConf is telling of something. Perhaps that GConf sucks. I've yet to understand what was wrong with home directory dotfiles. I don't think that Unix really needs a mostly unhandeditable Windows-like registry.

Specifically, extensible filesystem metadata makes a lot of sense, but it'll take a long time before it's used extensively, even if such a paradigm shift could take place. Of course, this is hardly an original idea. BeOS had it to some extent, as did MacOS prior to MacOSX.

The security benefits involved in some of it makes sense, but I think that the way he goes about it might be a little over the top.

Oh, and remember, LDAP is only useful for login information, apparently.

what was wrong with home directory dotfiles

The fact that they clutter up my home directory, and are difficult to put in CVS is what bothers me about them.

I'd prefer it if every application stashed its configuration somewhere under ~/.config/, and didn't use '.' to hide those files. This'd make it easier to put that one directory under version control, for a start.

Fair enough. We still don't need some obfuscated program in order to write such files for us.