Dial @ for Anonymous

I have added a new flag to Fish in version 4.25, which I have just pushed to the Fish repository on Github. The feature allows you to ask Fluidinfo to usher into existence a brand new, tagless object with no about tag, and is accessed using the new -@ flag as follows:

$ fish tag -@ private/note="Dial @ for Anonymous"

Tagged object d679b99d-fe5e-43e9-88dc-47334df776c7 with private/note = "Dial @ for Anonymous"

Although Fish usually exhibits an almost monastic silence when it successfully completes a non-reporting task you have set it, in this case, there seems quite a high likelihood that you will want to know the ID of the object it has created, so it tells you.

The new flag also works with the tag command’s recently added -f flag to accept input from a file or from standard input. In particular, this provides a convenient way of attaching a multi-line note to an anonymous object:

$ fish tag -@f private/note
Everyone needs a little privacy sometimes.
And you don't get much more private than a private tag
on an anonymous object.
^D

Tagged object afcf1f23-7c4b-44ea-a251-1bc99e959436 with private/note = "Everyone needs a little privacy sometimes.
And you don't get much more private than a private tag
on an anonymous object.
"

It will not have escaped the notice of the attentive reader of this About Tag blog that its author has spent perhaps five years proselytizing on behalf of Fluidinfo’s about tag (fluiddb/about) as the one true way to identify an object in Fluidinfo, benefiting as it does from the system-guaranteed properties of uniqueness and persistence. Nothing has changed: I still believe that data that is to have any social aspect, i.e., which might ever be shared with someone else, or associated with someone else’s data, is almost always better placed on an object with an about tag.

For personal data, however, particularly when private, I think the situation reverses. If the data I am writing is not intended to be in any way social, it may be that it is much better to put it on an anonymous object. It also provides an conventient way of guaranteeing that an object, at least at creation time, currently has no other tags.

I plan shortly to revamp the sequence command to allow it to use anonymous objects, which probably fit better with some of its use cases.