Simon Willison found an interesting tidbit on writing filesystems in Python.
At first, when I saw the words «writing a filesystem in Python», I thought it'd be an interesting, but useless hack. OK, so the filesystem runs in user space, but what's the point? Filesystems are supposed to be both low level and fast. So the point of writing a filesystem in Python is similar to writing a scheme interpreter as a loadable Linux kernel module: Why do it? Just because you can.
Simon had a very different take on the situation:
How about a filesystem where HTML files saved in a certain directory were instantly run through HTMLTidy and converted in to valid XHTML ? Or a custom network filesystem that saves files on a remote server using GnuPG to encrypt them before transfer? How about a read-only filesystem that lets you browse the contents of a MySQL database? Just imagine being able to use tools such as grep and find to search your database. A module that maps someone elses public web server to your own filesystem, making mirroring as easy as running a recursive cp command. A filesystem that updates a swish-e full-text index every time a file is saved to it - years before Microsoft release Longhorn. The possibilities are endless.I guess he's right. Sounds rather Plan 9-ish, actually.
