Re: Request: Test suite for EFS.

[u07ih abdn ac uk]

> Why don't we just store compound documents as directories? The files
> in this directory would be the individual components of this document.
> If they themselves were compound documents they would, of course, be
> subdirectories rather than files. 

This is what efs does, execpt it's only one file.

> We could always offer the option of storing the document as a (zipped)
> tar archive, but this would lose the search capabilities that some
> previous poster found desirable. In this case I would envisage untarring
> the file when it is opened and re-tarring it when the document is finally
> closed and unloaded from whatever application is being used to manipulate
> it.

And what if one of the components is a 30meg mpg? Thats going to take one hell
of a long time if you only want to change 3 lines in another file...
untar
change 3 lines
retar.

The way efs does it is like a normal filesystem, execpt that filesystem is
stored in a single file.
You can open the file using efs_open,
then you can open a file inside that compound file with efs_file_open, and then
do editting on any of that file, and you don't need to rewrite the whole thing
everytime. 

Plus, an efs module for gnome-vfs can be written (I've got a slight prototype of
one) and we can go as far as to make a kernel module (ys...probably linux only
but hey...) so you could do 
mount -t gnome-efs /mnt/gnumeric ~/home/spreadsheet.gnumeric 
and do standard cd /mnt/gnumeric; cp component1.jpg ~/
or whatever you want.

iain