OT- Linux file system tagging
VonSzarvas
Posts: 3,275
This discussion was created from comments split from: "Popular" tags.
VonSzarvas
Posts: 3,275
Comments
Popularity indication is a misconception. It is more akin to 'Tag your it'.
I am going to have to now find out what these tags are doing to my file system, and if they actually are useful. I strongly suspect they are just another distracting database management task that I have no wish to take on.
Watch out, some of these Tags spawn like Gemlins.
BTW -- I am very very fond of the 'Verilog' tag and the 'Forth' tag.
Why pray tell am I teaching you Linux? I thought you were the expert of experts.
I should have been more specific and asked: What is it you are running on Linux that has tags on files ?
Loopy, can you provide a screenshot? Details of any add-ons? This would be a useful thing to have.
Now, I wonder if those little issues you have with Quartus are related to your use of Gnome?
The tag feature still needs to be confirmed that it is related to Gnome. I have Gnome, yet I have no tags.
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So this tags feature might have come from Ubuntu or Mint and somehow migrated.
I am now trying my darned-est to figure out how to get to a pure Debian installation with loosing all my /home/george/<sub-directiories>.
I have a repair plan evolving, but I am writing up a step-by-step proceedure to make sure I understand everything correctly.
I confess, I have may a big mistake in keeping a separate /home partion while jumping from distribution to distribution. It seems that the 'hidden' dotfiles from one distribution are all mixed with another.
I will run a test of opening a new user in this computer to see if I also have the TAGS feature in a new user's installation. That may indicate it is a normal Gnome Debian feature. This is the 32bit Debian Wheezy 7.6.; NOT 64bit Debian Jessie 8.1
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I am not sure what I desire to do about these Tags, they just seem to be benign clutter.
But something rabid is afoot.
https://www.tagsistant.net/
http://superuser.com/questions/81563/whats-a-good-solution-for-file-tagging-in-linux
Time for an observation:
It is vanishingly unlikely that any two human beings are using identical computers. Same hardware, same operating system, same drivers, same applications, in all their many versions, same set up and configuration. No matter if we are talking Linux, Mac, Windows, whatever.
Ergo, it is impossible to predict if a suggested fix for a problem, that may work on my machine here, will actually work on anyone else's machine.
Unless they have a gate for gate, bit for bit, identical clone all bets for a 100% successful solution are off.
The best we can do is stumble around in this ever increasing pool of entropy we are creating, hoping that from time to time something works, never sure of when it will fail next. Trying to help each other make progress in the sticky mud of the ever changing swamp.
Computing is fun, isn't it ?
Even within a household or my own collection of computers, it is difficult to recreate identical results. It seems once you let one go into the wild, all bets of reputability are out the door.
Corporations try with locked down systems which kind of works at very basic levels but as soon as someone comes along with some small, minor, insignificant little change they need that the person next to them doesn't need, the butterfly wings start flapping!
My approach is to reduce the amount of attention that a computer requires for care and maintenance to the minimum while not giving my life to the Cloud.
So it is far easier to reload Linux when all else fails than to reload Windows in any form.
I just try to set aside personal data from that reloading process in a place where I can reach it when it is finally needed.
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I am beginning to feel that I would be quite happy if I could just turn off this tag feature. It just is creating bloat without any real functionality. No one but a very mental person is going to retain a complete system of Tags for each and every file and directory on their system.
It is just destined to fail.
First we had file names. Great, now we have the pain of dreaming up meaningful names for files so we can find them again.
When we had too many files they got split up into directories. Great, now we have the pain of dreaming up meaningful directory names plus the pain of dreaming up a meaningful classification system so as to put the right files in the right place.
Then we found we can't ever find related information. Perhaps that photo of grandad is in "My Photos" but the family history is in "My Documents" or whatever.
So we invented "tags" to relate different bits of information together. Great, now we have the pain of ensuring we tag everything in meaningful ways.
But consider this: A google search will generally find useful stuff for you from the entire internet of computers and files. It cares not about file names or tags or whatever.
I conclude, we may as well keep all files in a single directory. Name them with some unique ID like "c30524a109ba3b8b29e79ca3100a2dec" derived from a hash of the content.
Then have a google like search engine to index what we have and find it for us when we need it.
Tagging in the FS seems pretty antiquated, or wait, is that a new hipster thing now?
A decent Search utility or function will find file names and within files.
On WIndows I like Agent Ransack over whatever junk MS has by default indexing forever....
Gnome != Linux
Linux has no tags for files. Linux is just a kernel...
That ugly habit of calling the whole OS like it's kernel is named already sometimes infects me... but please let's try to be correct... we cannot speak of Linux as OS because (besides this being wrong) the "Linuxes" are too different to each other... e.g. Android vs OpenWrt vs Debian vs ...
We know for instance that a "hard drive" is the actual storage device yet millions of people or more call the desktop box a "hard drive" whereas a computer to them is the "hard drive" + keyboard + monitor etc. Yet we can be too pedantic with terminology especially in general use and just need to relax and refer to Ubuntu/Mint/Debian/OpenSuse etc as "Linux", is that such a big sin? Everyone here who uses "Linux" uses it in this form, not the pure kernel form.
Granted though, a desktop manager is not Linux in itself.
Windows Search. That's usually one of the first services I turn off. That thing will wear out disk drives with it's non stop indexing.
Directories do work of course. Up to a point. Until one day you find you have so many files on so many topics that it's impossible to recall how you classified them and hence which directory they might be in.
I once lost my car keys in the house. We turned the whole place upside down trying to find them. Nowhere. At the end of the day I reasoned that the only possible place left they could be is in the waste bin under the kitchen sink. Sure enough, they were! How the hell did that happen?
@koehler, @RDL2004
I can never find anything with whatever search system comes in Windows. In a recent, rather heated, OS war thread here I was told it does work, sadly not how to make it do so.
@yeti, @Peter
We have to face the fact that in common everyday language operating systems based on Linux are called "Linux". This was also a topic in the OS debates recently. It is ambiguous and annoying in some cases and it would be nice if people would be more specific then. For example with regard this mythical "linux tagging" feature.
This is from Linux Magazine - by its title, that would be a magazine solely and fully dedicated to writings about the Linux kernel
If we use Linux to refer ONLY to the kernel, then we really limit our topics of discussion.
File systems are extensions to the kernel - is there one true native file system that is part of the kernel?
Device drivers (except for a few primitive ones, possibly) are extensions to the kernel.
Anything implemented by a loadable module would be an extension to the kernel.
So we talk about so much that isn't Linux when we use Linux.
I'll have to think about this more but I need to get some kleenex before I run off to make a xerox of something.
Linguistic train-wreck ahead. I suppose I must adapt to "Linux-BASED operating systems" to be accurate.
We are going to get deeply into debating what is an OS and what is a kernel, when the world out their pretty much accepts the blurry brand concepts of what OSes are.
Okay, so Gnome is a desktop GUI under Linux, and so is KDE.
On the other hand, Windows pretty much can't separate the kernel from the OS and its users may never know that is possible.
So what is the OS? Linux with Unix utilities and Various choices of GUI.
****** WARNING **********
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What I am really wondering is if I might switch to KDE and eliminate the whole Tag scheme I have uncovered.
It seems that even if I switched, there would a lot of directories that would have a dotfile remaining for directory tags. I would have to walk the whole directory tree on a search and remove mission to get rid of this.
And then there are the tags that are attached to individual files. I am at a loss at how to purge those in a wholesale fashion.
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Am I stuck with tags regardless?
Here is more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_generic_and_genericized_trademarks
On the other hand: I have a program that runs on Linux but does not run on Linux. How is that possible? As you asked yes, many. Btrfs, exFAT, ext3, ext4, F2FS, JFS, NILFS2, NTFS, Reiser4, ReiserFS, VFAT, XFS, ZFS all come in the Linux kernel sources if you fetch the Linux project repository. They are not extensions, they are part of Linux.
Most device drivers people use are part of Linux in the same way as file systems. Yes there are drivers provided by third parties as well of course. Except all those file systems and drivers that come with Linux. The issue of them being used as loadable modules or compiled in is irrelevant.
About those Extended File System attributes: It seems to me that one could put tags in there. As you say that does not go well as said attributes will be lost when moving files around, putting them on a different file system that does not support attributes or transmitting files to other machines.
Also, to find anything by tag you then have to read all the tags from all the extended attributes attached to all your files. Soon enough you are going to optimize that by creating a tag cache somewhere. Perhaps it's just as well to store that tags in that cache only.
If you choose not to use tags and don't click on the tags tab from properties then you are no more stuck with them than you are stuck with earthworms. If you are now obsessed with tags and the .tagfiles and then constantly gnaw away at some deep place in your psyche, then by all mean switch, get rid of them, wipe the files from existence just to make peace with your inner self. Do you need to purge them?Are they stopping you from doing any productive work? (Beyond fueling endless debates wasting many peoples' time?
Oh so tangled we get in this world built on top of the Linux Kernel.
If I start with Fedora (default GUI is Gnome) but change to KDE and maybe install Clementine instead of Rythmbox, am I still using Fedora or have I created Bowler or Raspberry Beret* or some other hat derivative Linux distribution. At what point does my customization to Fedora alter it to the point where it is no longer recognized as Fedora? Do I need to package my changes and claim it's space among other distributions? Support repositories that have the latest release of my tool choices?
It seems any of this can be made as complicated as you want.
*I may have to claim that for a RedHat based Raspi distribution
Agreed. Ideally we would be selecting our tools on some rational criteria. Fitness for purpose, reliability, cost, availability etc etc etc. We are logical human beings right?
For me KDE vs Gnome is not a case of switching between either. Before there was KDE there was twm and CDE and such. They worked, they were clunky to use, hard to configure. Then came KDE, OK it was a switch moving to that but it was so much nicer to use. Then came Gnome, tried it, didn't work, never switched. Never heard that it had any new compelling features to make me want to look at it again.
Of course even engineers and programmer are not entirely driven by rationality as much as we like to think otherwise of ourselves. That is why there are editor wars, language wars, os wars. When it comes to a desktop environment the colours, rounded corners and location of buttons may be enough to swing a decision, never mind it's technical merits.
I would say that as long as your switching desktop environments and other applications around using code from Fedora's repositories you always have Fedora. That is clear enough. You could start swapping bits of code out, compiled from original sources perhaps, even the Linux kernel. At some point you may not have any Fedora left. I actually built by own Linux that way starting from RedHat, back in 1998 or so. I since learned there are better ways to do that though.
Interesting expressive language. Are we all just being tongue in cheek or really getting caught up in the drama.
We seem to have one upset and overworked moderator trying to be diligent. I like the earthworms comment.... never heard that before.
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The truth of the matter is that it isn't the Tag feature that so much concerns me as the spawning of unneeded dotfiles. These guys are hidden until you go looking for something and then you have a vast array of obscure and cryptic files and directories that you never heard of and that many never be documented anywhere.
Pure bloat. And what should we do? Never touch the dotfiles, just ignore the dotfiles, the dotfiles know their place.
>more drama<
In all honesty, it seems that the use of dotfiles should be limited to directories of specific defined purposes. They can slip into a role similar to cookies on a browser.
I'm totally with you on the dot file thing.
On this machine I have accumulated 63 dot files. For all kind of stuff from .adobe (Flash player) to .xsession-errors
On top of that there is a .config directory with 31 more config files in it (They are not hidden)
What started out as a place to tuck a few user related things like scripts to set up the environment on login is increasingly misused and run out of control.
Still, getting any two developers of open source code to agree on the correct way to do anything is nigh on impossible, love'm.
~/.bash_history is not a config file, probably ~/var/cache/bash/history would be a fitting place.
It's easy, but bad habits seem to be immortal...
But now I know what to do. I'm going to move my home directory to "/". Then I will have my bin, etc, lib and so on