re: gnome

[Todd Showalter <todd altsoftware com>]

On Tue, 8 Dec 1998 bratsche@dfw.net wrote:

> On Wed, 9 Dec 1998, Todd Showalter wrote:
> 
>>     This strikes me as "if you have a hammer, everything tends to look
>> like a nail".  gnome does not seem the right place to solve this problem
>> to me.  If you want ftp wrapped in a filesystem, try to get it into the
>> kernel of the OS you use.  If you want to be able to mount a tar file (or
>> a gzipped tar file, for that matter) as a filesystem, try to get it into
>> the kernel of the OS you use.
>> 
>>     The kernel is the place to solve this kind of thing.  I'm not running
>> gnome when I telnet into one of my servers, but I might want to be able to
>> use the above systems.  Filesystem wrapping like this should be available
>> even when I'm not running in X (or what have you).  Restricting it to
>> gnome is not desirable.
> 
> At the same time, GNOME is the only place we can reasonable expect to
> get it installed. People writing GNOME applications don't want to have
> to check the operating system in order to determine if they can mount
> an ftp server. You can't reasonably expect every operating system that
> GNOME is expected to eventually run on to implement VFS in their
> kernel. That's just not sane.

    True, but what this is proposing is moving what (at least in many
systems) is a kernel-domain problem into userland, and further wrapping it
up in a specific software system which is only available in certain
circumstances.  If I'm not running X, I'm not running gnome, which means
if I want the services you are proposing on the console, I have to have
duplicate functionality in two libraries.

    What if tar on the local system handles forked files (cf: BeOS...)?

    There are problems even in X.  What do you do (for instance) if the
FreeBSD folks go and impliment tarfs as part of the kernel, and it behaves
differently from the gnome version of tarfs?  Do you ignore the underlying
OS fs?  Do you throw out your own if you find one in the system?  Either
way, it becomes inconsistant.  If you toss the gnome version it is
inconsistant across gnome (which has to be coded for).  If you toss out
the local version, behavior is inconsistant on the same machine inside and
outside of gnome.

    Part of the function of the core OS is to support filesystems.  By
hijacking that responsibility, you create the possibility for conflict in
the future.  You are also taking responsibility for things like security,
locking, and other general filesystem issues that may require suid
binaries and will be a hassle to maintain.

    We already have a standard way of accessing files and network sockets,
for the most part.  In some operating systems there is talk of overlaying
a filesystem on the network protocol to offer the kind of service being
discussed (at least with respect to ftp).  Special-casing gnome to handle
a new set of filesystems extends gnome in ways that it should probably not
be extended.

> If you want to be able to telnet into a machine running VFS and have
> access to it, perhaps you should write a new shell program that will make
> use of it.

    I don't think this would be the way to go.  System services like
filesystems should be available to everything from the kernel interface.

							Todd.

--
Todd Showalter       |  "The time has come," the Walrus said,
                     |    "to talk of many things:"
gandalf@interlog.com |
todd@altsoftware.com |                            Lewis Carroll