[Sugar-devel] universal reference to datastore objects

[Benjamin M. Schwartz]

Walter Bender wrote:
> This topic comes up now and again (e.g.,
> http://cscott.net/Publications/OLPC/ufrgs-talk.pdf). I raised it in
> the context of wanted to create SVG files with embedded image data.

Yep, we've had this discussion many times.  My first was April 2007:
http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/sugar-devel/2007-April/002342.html

> 	<walterbender>	silbe: is there a way to find the actual path to, say
> a png file in the datastore, that I can then reference, or do I need
> to copy the data to the filesystem in order to reliably refer to it.

What happens when that png's datastore entry is deleted?  How is the
datastore, or the user, supposed to know which objects should not be
deleted because other entries depend on them?

This is the dependency tracking problem, and so far every time it's come
up the conclusion has been that we would rather force an explicit copy
than invent a dependency handling system.  Ideally, the datastore can be
structured so that duplicates are actually only stored once on disk, thus
recovering the efficiency advantage.  To achieve this, we  must make
datastore objects be not a single file, but a directory of files.

--Ben

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