Re: ioctls for gnome-vfs

[Jody Goldberg <jody gnome org>]

On Tue, Nov 19, 2002 at 04:32:39AM -0500, Alexander Larsson wrote:
> 
> So, libgsf Is probably a good place for handling structured files that are 
> typically used by programs.
agreed.
 
> 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.

I think it would be useful to have wrappers in 2 directions.

1) GsfInput/GsfOutput wrappers for GnomeVFSHandle.  I think we only
   have input, but it pretty trivial to add output.  It would
   potentiall be useful to expand these into supporting
   GsfInfile/GsfOutfile too.

2) A Vfs module that takes a GsfInfile/GsfOutfile (The generic
   interface to all structured file types in gsf).  This would give
   gnome-vfs support for any of the formats libgsf supports.
   Specificly ZIP and OLE.

Things like tar, gzip, bzip2 are in a bit of a grey area.  They may
belong in both.  The main advantage of libgsf is that it is very
light and has an interface that attempts to minimize copying.
Gnome-VFS has piles more work on async support.

Here's a proposal for the 2.4 time frame.  Move libgsf-gnome into
gnome-vfs (the vfs and bonobo wrappers).  Move tar and the
compression wrappers into libgsf and inject it into the platform.