[9fans] Vcard filesystem

[9fans] Vcard filesystem

[sirjofri]

Hello everyone,

some time ago I started working on a filesystem for vcard files. The filesystem manages a vcard database (stored in the user lib dir), and mounts itself to /mnt/vcard per default.

I'm at a point where I consider it ready for anyone to use. There might be bugs, memory leaks, and other things that could be improved, but it is something that could be used as a backend system for other tools, or just used directly.

https://shithub.us/sirjofri/vcardfs
https://git.sr.ht/~sirjofri/vcardfs

(Technical details following, feel free to stop reading here).

It comes with a library (libvcard) for parsing vcard files, and supports version 2.1 and 3.0/4.0, though it doesn't validate the vcard data (it only reads the syntax and loads the data, with the only exception being the version property, but that gets too technical).

The filesystem supports importing new vcard data, and also exporting the whole database as vcard, as well as exporting individual cards. For exporting, it only supports vcard version 4.0 (hardcoded).

It is however important to note that I'm not very experienced at writing filesystems and properly synchronized code, so there could be issues when multiple programs access the data.

Patches are welcome.

sirjofri

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Re: [9fans] Vcard filesystem

[Noam Preil]

Definitely interested, I'll take a look :)

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Re: [9fans] Vcard filesystem

[Shawn Rutledge]

> On Nov 8, 2024, at 17:04, sirjofri <sirjofri+ml-9fans@sirjofri.de> wrote:
> 
> Hello everyone,
> 
> some time ago I started working on a filesystem for vcard files. The filesystem manages a vcard database (stored in the user lib dir), and mounts itself to /mnt/vcard per default.

I don’t think I like the idea of one big vcf file for all contacts.  I’d prefer to use a directory with a file for each contact, where the file name is the person’s name.  That way it’s already easy to use cat and grep on the raw files, and easy to use tools like syncthing to keep the whole database in sync between devices (there’s much less chance of sync conflicts if it’s broken up, and the file timestamp always indicates the last-updated time for a single record.  Yeah, we don’t have syncthing, but I assume you have some way to sync files for offline use.)  The file server should just make each vcard file appear as a directory, and each property becomes a file inside, as you have it already.  It should help with multi-process writing too, only writing to one record at a time in each process.

But it’s good that you have a working parser for the most recent version.


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Re: [9fans] Vcard filesystem

[Frank D. Engel, Jr.]

That strategy worked particularly well on BeOS, which had database-like 
indexed extended attributes in its native filesystem.

Individual "People" files basically stored all of the individual fields 
(phone number, etc.) as extended attributes of the files and they were 
indexed by the filesystem and rapidly searchable.

Not vcards, but native to the OS and nicely designed for it.


On 11/14/24 04:27, Shawn Rutledge wrote:
>> On Nov 8, 2024, at 17:04, sirjofri <sirjofri+ml-9fans@sirjofri.de> wrote:
>>
>> Hello everyone,
>>
>> some time ago I started working on a filesystem for vcard files. The filesystem manages a vcard database (stored in the user lib dir), and mounts itself to /mnt/vcard per default.
> I don’t think I like the idea of one big vcf file for all contacts.  I’d prefer to use a directory with a file for each contact, where the file name is the person’s name.  That way it’s already easy to use cat and grep on the raw files, and easy to use tools like syncthing to keep the whole database in sync between devices (there’s much less chance of sync conflicts if it’s broken up, and the file timestamp always indicates the last-updated time for a single record.  Yeah, we don’t have syncthing, but I assume you have some way to sync files for offline use.)  The file server should just make each vcard file appear as a directory, and each property becomes a file inside, as you have it already.  It should help with multi-process writing too, only writing to one record at a time in each process.
> 
> But it’s good that you have a working parser for the most recent version.
> 

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