Re: Integrating support for GNOME VFS into glibc

[Nicholas Allen <nick allen onlinehome de>]

> One problem (which admittedly can be addressed) would be seeking. You
> would need to keep the whole file in-memory, which may get quite large
> (how do you seek on dynamically generated files by http, think slashdot
> for example, which may have changed if you re-read the file). mmap'ing
> would also be a problem for example.

Seeking is not a problem because one can simply set errno to ESPIPE to 
indicate that the stream is a FIFO. Most applications that use files read 
from the start to finish without seeking but if it was found to be a major 
problem one could of course buffer content and then seek in the buffer but I 
am hoping that using ESPIPE error will still allow the vast majortity of 
applications to function without problems.