A Novel, Tag-Based File-System

A Novel, Tag-Based File-system is a 2014 paper by Aaron Laursen. Laursen introduces STUFFS, a fully-backwards compatible non-hierarchical file system implemented in Python using FUSE and SQLite.

"Everything is a file"

• Plan 9 takes Unix's "everything is a file" philosophy and sprints to places Unix feared. Users, pieces of hardware, and GUI widgets are all files.

• Files were more than just pointers to binary blobs on a disk. Really, files were interfaces.

Translation between abstractions

(page 15)

• Humans think about files in three different ways: the concept (say, a copy of The Hobbit), the representation (a PDF file), and the actual data (the raw bits).