Oct 21, 2026, 10:22 AM@hipsterelectron everyone just gets so horny for the constraints that only corporations care about. I know those constraints inside and out, and they don't actually allow for a really beautiful family of constraint topologies.
Why can't I have a slider that says how strict my dfs needs to be?? Why are my options fully synchronous remote storage and syncthing?
@amy crying
Oct 21, 2026, 10:23 AM@hipsterelectron why can't we just treat - really simplistically!! - a directory as a unique namespace?!
@amy i disagree on this point personally i think a view of a hierarchical filesystem (a domain) should be fully local (except for read only and cow refs) and then syncs across domains should be atomic and transactional. all process-local fds should be local to a named domain and processes should inherit that of their parent by default. access to domains should be serialized to persistence through cryptographic keys. the system works together and the userspace API is largely unchanged but the semantics are wildly different
@amy basically everything is a zip file
Oct 21, 2026, 10:32 AM@hipsterelectron I notionally don't disagree. This is essentially an object capability design.
My intention was to say that an extremely simple extension to the existing model that unlocks a lot is to just abstract one level further than "an entire volume" and that in particular directories get you pretty far with no changes needed for the overwhelming majority of software.
That said, there's much more sophisticated things like you describe that can also be pursued
@amy i think yours is not opposed to mine they're just for wildly different uses. so i suppose my usage of "disagree" was wildly inappropriate. better word needed here
Oct 21, 2026, 10:34 AM@hipsterelectron not wildly. Language is hard 😊
Oct 21, 2026, 10:35 AM@hipsterelectron I also agree that that one, yours, subsumes the other
@amy i was really excited to realize it doesn't need to change anything about the userspace i/o API from POSIX except to express precisely what POSIX won't do
Oct 21, 2026, 11:09 AM@rakoo @amy @hipsterelectron i am a luddite with my syncthing to a nas zfs volume with nightly borg backups
Oct 21, 2026, 11:14 AM@rakoo @amy @hipsterelectron i think it’s a pretty satisfying setup because it works on phones and computers pretty seamlessly. syncing specific folders on the mobile devices helps a bit. the volume is also exposed via copyparty in case i want to get at more stuff/stream my music files.
Oct 21, 2026, 11:14 AM@rakoo @hipsterelectron I honestly would put git-annex on the syncthing side of the slider. Basically all the partial syncs aren't terribly different from having a bunch of individual syncthing shares, and every action is a full commit of an object instead of byte-range updates.
Your cassandra thing sounds quite interesting. You may also be intrigued by pho.spookygirl.boo/book/jmap/article/largeblob_capability/ which I've partially implemented. It's sort of the foundation of some partial sync things I'm noodling on. Not super usable as-is, mostly a matter of exploring problem spaces