Re: About the Gnome Help browser

["J. Patrick Narkinsky" <patrick amphigory tez net>]

Just my comment on the whole "URL syntax for various help documents" thing
-- it seems to me that it would be better to push all this stuff into the
Virtual File System code discussed on the web site.  Really, we're going
to have to give the VFS support for many of these schemes anyway, so why
not make it general?

Is there anything in the source for VFS right now?  What are the
status/plans on this?  For my tastes, I would like to see a VFS that could
support the following syntaxes (transparent to the application) at least:
	Plain Old Filenames
	file:// -- Intuitively obvious to the Casual Observer
	ftp:// -- IOTTCO
	http:// -- IOTTCO
	config:// -- Something vaguely similar to the Win 95 registry.
		I like the concept of a registry in general, but this 
		could be much more UNIXy:
		1) Rather than a monolithic, binary database, we
		   could do it using text-files that could be 
		   edited using VI or other...
		2) Keys/Values could be accessed using a standard
		   file-like interface, and could be browsed using 
		   an explorer.
	man:// --  falthrough
	info:// --  fallthrough
	doc:// --  Why not?  We would need to provide at least some 
		file-typing support, but that would be useful anyway.
	smb:// -- we could do network browsing using smbclient etc.  this
		could be really cool.
	mysql:// -- This is kind of radical, and would be inadequate for 
		many purposes, but it should be possible to do VERY 
		simplistic database browsing through a FS explorer.  

Eventually, the kernel could be made aware of the GNOME VFS -- I
vaguely remember some work being done in the past on user-space
filesystems that could be loaded as modules.  Of course, this would end up
being Free UNIX only, so we probably wouldn't want to make it required
functionality for GNOME (or would we?).

The big point is that VFS code could provide one heckuva lot of
functionality for a relatively low price.  Make it modular, make it
flexible, and you can run with it forever.

Patrick

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J. Patrick Narkinsky | God doesn't like intellectual slackers any
                     | better than he likes any other kind of slacker.
                     |                          - C.S. Lewis
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