Re: GNOME VFS and FUSE.

[Alexander Larsson <alexl redhat com>]

On Fri, 2006-07-07 at 11:47 +0100, Darren Kenny wrote:

> Personally, I would prefer to see us move with FUSE layered on top of GNOME
> VFS as the solution for the legacy applications - why should GNOME apps have
> to suffer a base API like POSIX - which you have to admit is quite likely to
> be wrapped in a more "user-friendly" API again, since it'd be so complex to
> get simple meta-data or even decent error return codes, and we've back to
> where we started with another GNOME VFS later.

I think this is the likely outcome. We'd somehow have a way to move
between gnome-vfs uris and FUSE-mounted local files so that applications
that don't use gnome-vfs can still access non-local files, even if the
API they use for that (POSIX) isn't ideal for networked filesystems.

Anyway, I haven't really had time to look at FUSE this week, since I've
been doing gnome-vfs dbus work all week, and I'm going on vacation for a
while starting next week, so its unlikely we'll get any motion on this
in the near future.

> An other issue that was raised was the reliability of GNOME VFS, in
> that there was a risk of data-loss - this is surely a bug and should
> be verifiable through a thorough test-suite - if it still exists. I
> would think the most likely way that there could be a risk of data
> loss is in the realms of network based communication - and I can't see
> how FUSE would be any different here.

It would be much appreciated if sun could spend some time on the backend
implementation quality and doing some sort of test-suite. This is one of
the main problems with gnome-vfs atm, and its to a very large degree due
to very few people actually working on gnome-vfs.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
 Alexander Larsson                                            Red Hat, Inc 
                   alexl redhat com    alla lysator liu se 
He's a deeply religious one-eyed sorceror haunted by memories of 'Nam. She's a 
cynical belly-dancing detective from Mars. They fight crime!