Re: Module proposal: gio and gvfs for gnome 2.22?

[Alexander Larsson <alexl redhat com>]

On Tue, 2007-09-25 at 05:29 -0700, Alex Graveley wrote:
> Seems like it might be less risky to start in 2.22 by porting all the
> simpler load/save gnome-vfs users to gio first, to flesh out the API.
> 
> Replacing an API which has been stable for a few years with an API
> that hasn't seen much review, has had no releases, and has had no
> applications ported to use it scares me.
> 
> If load/save is what most people use gnome-vfs for, why not write a
> tiny library with a tiny API that does this well, instead of
> introducing an entire IO framework?  Then this library could be
> implemented using gnome-vfs, or gio, or kio, or fuse, or posix, or
> win32 on the backend.   (Maybe even made part of fdo.)  Keeping the
> API tiny would avoid conflicting with the myriad IO frameworks that
> exist in the high level language platforms.

While most apps need code only to load and save files the whole desktop
needs more than that. The file manager needs to be able to all sorts of
things, and the file selector (that all apps indirectly pull in) need to
do a lot more than load and save.

libgio is a (relatively small) API which abstracts out what these apps
needs and implements support for local files. 

I'm sure you can make it smaller, but for every user there would be some
feature missing.