Re: Announcing gnomevfs-mount 0.0.1 (very first version).

[Alexander Larsson <alexl redhat com>]

On Wed, 2004-10-06 at 10:22 +0200, Carlos Perelló Marín wrote:
> On Wed, 2004-10-06 at 09:10 +0200, Alexander Larsson wrote:
> > On Wed, 2004-10-06 at 01:26 +0200, Carlos Perelló Marín wrote:
> > > On Tue, 2004-10-05 at 17:53 +0200, Alexander Larsson wrote:
> > > > On Mon, 2004-10-04 at 14:38 -0600, Sandino Flores Moreno wrote:
> > > > > Hello folks.
> > > > > 
> > > > > Since I saw gmailfs (1), I wondered why gnome does not have a way to
> > > > > mount gnomevfs-uris on the linux filesystem.
> > > > 
> > > > Gnome in general has to work on many unix versions. It can't depend on a
> > > > specific kernel.
> > > 
> > > But we could use it in Linux so all applications will be able to access
> > > to remote locations and left the current code for unsupported platforms
> > > (and perhaps their developers could implement such support under their
> > > OS). As far as I know fuse is a library so you are not depending on the
> > > kernel directly.
> > 
> > Going fully to a FUSE-like approach would mean a huge redesign of how
> > the desktop handles things like this, and that would only work on linux.
> > Doing both is not gonna work very well.
> 
> But you are assuming that it will be only available under Linux and
> that's also fixable.

Its not really, because other kernels are not all free software so we
might not even be able to fix it. Also, requiring kernel-level hacking
to port gnome to some unix is a pretty steep requirement.

> > > Users don't understand why they are not able to open files from remote
> > > locations on non GNOME applications. In fact, I don't know about any
> > > GNOME application that it's able to edit a remote file directly.
> > 
> > Well. We need to fix them then. 
> 
> Sure, but I see it harder than a fuse-like approach, I don't think Gimp
> will be ever "fixed" that way, but If you use a fuse-like approach it
> will not need such fix.

Lets make all gnome apps use it well, then I'm pretty sure other apps
will follow.

> > > > Also, i personally think mounting things like this can be problematic.
> > > > There will be many posix details that the mounted filesystem won't
> > > > comply with, that an application using the normal filesystem might
> > > > depend on.
> > > 
> > > You are right, it's a problem, but IMHO those are called bugs, and bugs
> > > are fixable and those kind of bugs are easily fixable than, for
> > > instance, add gnome-vfs support in emacs or any piece of software that
> > > is able to open files.
> > 
> > The reason they don't follow posix semantics is that its not possible to
> > do so on non-posix backends.
> 
> Could you give me concrete examples?

For instance, rename atomically overwrites the destination on posix
filesystems. And this is a feature many apps rely on to guarante that
races don't exist. You just can't guarantee that on something like ftp,
which gnome-vfs supports. Gnome-vfs has weaker semantics, so apps won't
depend on things like this.

> I know that Apple is doing it since long ago with MacOSX and they mount
> more or less the same things gnome-vfs does (webdav, ftp, nfs, loop
> devices, smb and perhaps more types I don't remember at this moment) and
> they don't seem to have any problem.

Well. They only have one kernel to support, and they have much better
control of the core software that runs on their system. However, i'd
guess you can exploit the non-posixness to cause problems for some
unsuspecting osx apps.

Gnome-vfs and Nautilus was designed together. It has the features apps
like nautilus need (like asynchronous i/o and mime handling), a lot of
code and features depend on how it works, and its much easier to extend
to what we need in for the desktop than a posix-based API (for instance
for searching). It was decided a long time ago that this was the way
document-level file i/o should work in gnome. I'm not interested in
changing this at this time, but you're of course free to work on
gnomevfs-mount if you like.

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 Alexander Larsson                                            Red Hat, Inc 
                   alexl redhat com    alla lysator liu se 
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