What is it?

SloFS (pronounced slow-FS) is a quick and dirty, mostly POSIX conforming, read/write filesystem API on top of SQLite. The purpose is to simply provide an alternative to various tiny-domain formats for data storage, much like zziplib does, but with the added ability to write to the data store.

Why?

Why not? During development of the pm password management tool, the authors found it necessary to have an open format, easy to read data file. Originally YAML was chosen for its terse and easy to write and debug data format -- unfortunately, the C libraries for parsing such a data structure are too painful. After considering other options, they finally came across zziplib. Realizing that their data format was just a simple set of strings and that reading and writing to a filesystem were simple and well-defined algorithms already, the authors set out to start using this library instead. Unfortunately, they realized that zziplib is a read only API to zip files, and finally came up with the crazy idea of implementing a complete filesystem on top of a very lightweight SQL database. SloFS was the result of their discussion and research.

SloFS -- It's not stupid, it's just slow.