When Longhorn release, Linux got end. 3500

I was under the impression that the point of it was that the Longhorn 'filing system' would involve applications storing configuration, document metadata, and possibly even documents themselves in an SQL Server instance rather than Windows RegistryFS AttributesFiles.

The notion isn't completely outrageous, being the way that IBM handles data on the OS-400 platform, and we may actually see it on Linux first, between:

- Gnome Storage

- Some KDE project that in a Google search, KDE folk seem unable to properly remember :-)

What would be particularly interesting would be a move to an application development approach where persistence is managed not by periodic serialization to a file, but by, on an ongoing basis, storing updates to the documents as transactions in a database.

Strong suits to this:

- You don't ever have to click on "Save" because the document continually saves itself

- No hideous XML bloat (though database indexes can make up for this, completely behind your back ;-))

- Potential for greatly enhanced reliability in several ways...

1. You "harden" one database store, and protect everything;

2. In cases where an application starts puking pointers everywhere, this likely turns into an ABORT TRANSACTION that will roll things back to the last consistent state;

3. A few foreign key constraints can declaratively prevent various sorts of "bad pointer in document" errors from getting to the database

- Potential for linking between documents in a way that XML promised but usually doesn't deliver on...

I have a hard time fathoming how this could be less efficient than the current holy grail of "do it all in XML!!!", which, for being claimed to be a "light weight" system, looks pretty heavyweight to me.

Anyway, this sort of thing was what seemed interesting in what Longhorn reports I have heard.

For the vapourware to also include some Chrome (see the Hackers' Dictionary for the definition, which is absolutely appropriate!), and for it to even turn into Just The Chrome, would be unsurprising. -- What do little birdies see when they get knocked unconscious?