Re: Support for ACLs/non Unix style permissions in gnome-vfs

[snickell stanford edu]

Quoting Nils Philippsen <nils redhat de>:

> Hi Seth and others,
>
> with recent exposure to file system ACLs (the betas of our next
> release), I thought about what's barring nautilus to handle them as

Fantastic! This is on our "TODO" list, but we've all been lazy and
slack, and done other things. We had a draft API for this some months
back, I'll try to dig that up for you when I get home.

> My first idea about it would be a generic, extensible permission API
> where you would have "permission objects" attached to the
> GnomeVFSFileInfo objects of the files. With this we could support
> Unix
> style rwx permissions, Unix ACLs, probably Windows ACLs (if we
> wanted
> to) and others. I'd have to exploit one of the reserved members of
> GnomeVFSFileInfo for that, would that be okay?

Yes, this is the basic approach taken by the draft API. There are two
other important ACLs it would be nice to support through this mechanism:
AFS and WebDAV. Actually, one of the reserved members in
GnomeVFSFileInfo is "reserved" specifically for ACL support :-)

> And while I'm at it: ABI compatibility is nice, I have some ideas how
> to
> keep programs that use the existing GnomeVFSFileInfo::permissions
> working while allowing (with a #define) programs to use the new API
> as
> well. That would require a bit of #define-trickery, ok to do it?

The reserved members are there to preserve ABI compatibility, no need
for #defines. If you just use one of the reserved members without
changing its type (it should be a void * right now) you won't have any
ABI problems I think.

-Seth