Re: VFS/kernel (was 'gnome')

[Jimen Ching <jching flex com>]

On Wed, 9 Dec 1998, Quantum Seep wrote:
> the VFS would be transparent to the applications using it.  Obviously this
> would not be used for core filesystems but would provide an easy way to add
> VFSs on the fly, without knowing what kind of kernel the user is running.  I

This has potential.  My idea was to create a module which acts as a front
end to the different types of file collections, i.e. tar, zip, shar, etc.
These would be the backend modules, which act like plug-ins.  The vfs
kernel module would be loaded at boot time and load the backends when
needed.

The point of all this is to hide the details of the various file
collection mechanisms and still allow legacy apps to use the new
capbility.  This of course means we need a non-root access mount program
to create the directory hierarchy.  The resulting hierarchy is, of course,
limited to the user running the mount program.  This allows me to do
something like:

vfsmount some.tar.gz ~/mnt
cd ~/mnt
more some_file_in_archive

The user doesn't need to know how to extract files from archives and
graphical file managers can automatically mount these archives by just
double clicking on it.  The file manager doesn't need to be changed to
access the new API because the vfs kernel module makes it look like a
native fs.

--jc
--
Jimen Ching (WH6BRR)      jching@flex.com     wh6brr@uhm.ampr.org