Re: Massive gnome-vfs proposal.

[Maciej Stachowiak <mjs eazel com>]

jrb@redhat.com writes:

> Hi guys,
> 
> In gnome-vfs, the basic file unit is the GnomeVFSURI struct, which
> contains all the necessary information needed to resolve a url.  The
> problem is, strictly speaking, a URI doesn't necessarily have all the
> information about resolution built in.  (URN's, for example, need to be
> resolved externally.) 

I'm not sure what you mean by this. Yes, URNs are more complicated to
resolve than URIs. But why does this imply that a URI doesn't have all
the information about resolution built in?

> As a result, I'd like to rename GnomeVFSURI to be GnomeVFSURL, which
> is a more appropriate name.

The set of URIs is the set of URLs and the set of URNs, so every URL
is also a URI. Maybe you are saying that GnomeVFSURI is intrinsically
incapable of handling URNs, but I don't agree; I don't see why
urn-method.c could not be written by a sufficiently enterpsising/crazy
person.

 - Maciej

> Additionally, we need an
> additional step that could let us do the URI->URL conversion.  This way
> we can add a real GnomeVFSURI struct that looks something like:

I don't think it's the case that every URN must have an associated
URL. In fact, URNs must remain globally unique and in some sense
`valid' even when the resource they point to is not accessible through
any URL, or even no longer existant.

 - Maciej