Re: NFS/AFS and is_local

[Mikael Hallendal <micke codefactory se>]

tis 2002-11-05 klockan 12.29 skrev Malcolm Tredinnick:
> OK, even though it was the friendly Swedish guy who originally asked
> these questions and I was just doing my poor imitation of a helpful
> person, I'm interested now.

Good :)

> > 	Anyway - the main thing I think is (perhaps) to expand the use of
> > eel_vfs_has_capabilities () - since it's a bit late in the day to be
> > folding in that level of API immaturity into gnome-vfs IMHO. I think we
> > should work out what set of functionality we want in there - and then
> > move it wholesale into gnome-vfs for 2.4.

Sounds like a reasonable way to go.
 
> > 	Some things that might be useful:
> > 
> > typedef enum {
> > 	EEL_VFS_CAPABILITY_SAFE_TO_EXECUTE,
> > 	EEL_VFS_CAPABILITY_IS_REMOTE_AND_SLOW
> > } EelVfsCapability;
> > 
> > gboolean  eel_vfs_has_capability  (const char           *text_uri,
> > 				   EelVfsCapability      capability);
> > 
> > 	I think (perhaps) it'd be better to abstract this somewhat further;
> > towards a 'performance' enumeration something like:
> > 
> > 	FAST_LOCAL, FAST_REMOTE, SLOW_REMOTE
> 
> This feels wrong. You're grouping too many access methods together here.
> For example,
> 
>   eel_vfs_has_capability_uri (uri, EEL_VFS_CAPABILITY_IS_REMOTE_AND_SLOW)
> 
> returns 1 for an NFS mounted filesystem. Now, while my NFS filesystem at
> work is certainly slower to access than my local ones, it's nothing
> compared to a WebDAV access. The point I am making (poorly) here is that
> I can't see why I care too much about FAST_REMOTE versus FAST_LOCAL,
> except that a remote system might go away at some point.

I agree, would just having a few more enum's for different speeds do or
should we have some way of setting "speed" of access. So that you can
say (in Nautilus for example) load previews for access speed faster than
X. You get my point? :)

> 	- can I write to it,
> 	- do I trust it enough to execute from,
> 	- is it reasonable to poll regularly for changes (yes for local,
> 	  slightly less often for NFS, no for WeDAV),
> 	- is it slow to perform operations (possibly the same as the
> 	  last point)
> 	- ... [other ideas here]

Hmm .. it would be nice to have some way of asking if it "looks local"
to the user. For WebDAV for example the user actually connects to
another server manually. This is not the case with NFS/AFS. Ie. even if
the NFS/AFS mounts are slower than the local ones you probably want
Nautilus to treat them the same since you as a user don't see any
difference between them, other than them being slow.

> > 	or somesuch; either way it needs more thought; we'd then want some sort
> > of gconf stringv that would allow you to configure which paths / servers
> > are special case 'local', 'fast remote' etc.
> 
> Yeah, that's not crazy. Future-proof, too.

Shouldn't this rather go into the metafiles in ~/.nautilus/metafiles
rather than GConf?

Regards,
  Mikael Hallendal
-- 
Mikael Hallendal                micke codefactory se
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