Re: GNOME VFS and FUSE.



Darren Kenny wrote:
Hi,

I would like to get some discussion going on this topic as it really is a
point of concern for non-Linux users of GNOME...

According to Robert Love[1] the prospect of FUSE replacing GNOME VFS was well
received at GUADEC. I was present, and took part from a Solaris standpoint, in
the discussion about this at Alex's talk about the future of GNOME VFS.

I certainly didn't think that it was well received - more a controversial
change I would think. It seemed to me that there was a split in the room.

OK, some people accepted that it is a possible solution to "legacy"
applications that are not opensource, but also unlikely to ever even consider
the possibility of using GNOME VFS - and I do tend to agree, from this
perspective but not in the way that is being suggested, i.e. to replace GNOME
VFS with FUSE.

Im a FUSE fanboy but I dont think you will see FUSE completely replace a VFS. For async operation you are going to need some kind of wrapper API which could provide suitable fallback to a legacy Gnome-VFS or other VFS systems.

Ideally FUSE would be the main way with apps not requiring an async API (or unwilling to depened on a VFS ) being able to use it directly with POSIX calls if they so choose.

It would be great if this wrapper API (and possibly a document centric API too) was in Glib.


I don't see why we should push out a perfectly good GNOME VFS implementation,
with a rich API, to be replaced with a POSIX based file API that would result
in some weird uses of ioctl()s and the like to access meta-information. Not to
mention the kernel context switching that would result from such calls.

I makes more sense to me to fix/address the "concerns" that people have with
the GNOME VFS API - and these mainly seem to be down to complexity - or a
thinking that it's too difficult to use - where does this come from? If it's
really like this, then it seems we need to provide a simple version of the
API for people that need it.

The problems of ABI stability would limits the ability to correct current flaws. It also seems you cant even fully remove Bonobo dependency as a result of this so its going to make life difficult to maintain Gnome-vfs in the long run.

Anyways, thats just my thoughts on the matter...


--
Mr Jamie McCracken
http://jamiemcc.livejournal.com/




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