[Clipart] Duplicated items / keywords question

[Matthew Gates]

On Saturday 24 September 2005 11:45, Jonadab the Unsightly One wrote:
> Matthew Gates <matthew at porpoisehead.net> writes:
> > have all the files in one place (e.g. unsorted), and then build the
> > category directories containing only symbolic links?
>
> This is impractical due to technical limitations.  Among other things:
>
> 1.  Some filesystems on which the package may be unpacked do not
>     support symbolic links.  For instance, iso9660 and vfat
>     filesystems (probably the second and third most commonly used
>     types of filesystem at this point, respectively) do not support
>     them.

I assumed that on these filesystems, tar would simply make copies of the 
files.  It may mean the unpacked library would be large, but we already 
have that problem - at least the file we need to distribute would be 
smaller.

> 2.  Some filesystems on which the package may be unpacked do NOT LIKE
>     having lots and lots of files in one big directory; in the case of
>     vfat filesystems, for instance, significant slowdowns can occur
>     after only a few thousand files.  The OCAL is far too large to be
>     all in one directory.

Hmm, yes I suppose this would be a real problem.  One way round this would 
be to have dibdirectories like 001, 002, 003 ... with 50 or 100 files in 
each.  It's ugly, but if we have to compensate for the shortcomings of 
some filesystems, it'd probably going to have to happen sooner or later.


Another possibility is to abandon using the filesystem for distinguishing 
keywords, and have some sort of index with an application for finding the 
files...  This would make us bit more of software project (one that might 
not be easy to do in a truly cross platform way), but it would certainly 
enable us to avoid the file duplication problem.  Mind you, doing it well 
would be tough.