Re: ioctls for gnome-vfs

[Alexander Larsson <alexl redhat com>]

On Mon, 18 Nov 2002, Jody Goldberg wrote:

> On Mon, Nov 18, 2002 at 11:11:08AM -0500, Alexander Larsson wrote:
> > 
> > I don't like this at all. It heavily affects all sorts of filesystem 
> > semantics in ways people will not expect. It also puts way to much 
> > domain-specifc knowledge in the vfs. Let us not make the filesystem layer 
> > know the layout of word documents.
> 
> This raises an interesting point.  Should there be a relationship
> between libgsf and gnome-vfs ?  If gnome-vfs is the wrong place for
> knowledge of file formats to go the possible libgsf is the place to
> put it ?  It already has zip and ole in/out with an abstract
> interface to all of it.
> 
> In this example to read the prop streams in a doc/xls/ppt file you
> need to read 2 property streams out of an OLE2 file.  The same sort
> of issue arises with OpenOffice xml streams inside zip files.

While it would perhaps be possible to write a gnome-vfs module for OLE2 
files (so you'd open file://some/file.doc#ole:/some/substream) I don't 
think that is the right way to go. No (or at least very few) users will 
want that sort of functionallity in e.g. the shell or the file manager 
(since they don't understand the internal layout of word documents 
anyway), and if you're writing a word processor chances are that a 
dedicated API for these sorts of things are more helpful than a generic 
minimal VFS interface.

So, libgsf Is probably a good place for handling structured files that are 
typically used by programs.

What would be good in GnomeVFS for these kinds of things are a way to 
convert stuff into things that gnome-vfs handle. For instance, converting 
a file descriptor into a GnoemVFSHandle, or putting a GnomeVFSHandle 
frontend on some other internal stream.

-- 
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 Alexander Larsson                                            Red Hat, Inc 
                   alexl redhat com    alla lysator liu se 
He's a hate-fuelled soccer-playing paramedic looking for a cure to the poison 
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