Re: VFS for legacy apps (was: gvfs status report)

[Alexander Larsson <alexl redhat com>]

On Thu, 2007-02-22 at 13:49 +0100, Alexander Larsson wrote:
> On Thu, 2007-02-22 at 10:33 +0100, Alexander Larsson wrote:
> > On Thu, 2007-02-22 at 03:10 -0600, Hans Petter Jansson wrote:
> > 
> > > This won't work. We need to be able to extract all the mount information
> > > from the path, so that if the app stores the path across sessions, say,
> > > in "recent documents", the FUSE layer will know what to do when it's
> > > accessed later.
> > 
> > I'm just not certain this is true. I mean, we already have this problem
> > with say filenames pointing to unmounted NFS shares, or to removable
> > media. Is this a huge problem? You'll just get an error that the file is
> > not there, go "ah, yeah", click on the icon to mount the share and try
> > again.
> 
> As a further example of this I tried OSX. It has a system similar to the
> first proposal. I.E. When you mount smb://server/share in the finder it
> appears as the unix mount /Volume/server;share, and connecting to
> ftp://ftp.gnome.org/ gives you a /Volume/ftp.gnome.org mount.
> 
> It handled the recent files case by not showing the recently opened file
> in the recent files menu when it was on a share that is no longer
> mounted. However, if I remounted it it appeared again. (Although i did
> have to restart the app, which is sort of crap.)

In fact, its likely they implement this by just stat()ing all the files
in the recent list. This is a great example of where automounting would
royaly screw things up. Given a traditional unix system there wouldn't
be anything bad with a solution like that (in fact, it would be very
nice to not show deleted files in the recent menu). However, if any stat
can lead to indefinite blocking and displaying of random authentication
dialogs you suddenly have to do something much more complicated in order
to not suck.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
 Alexander Larsson                                            Red Hat, Inc 
                   alexl redhat com    alla lysator liu se 
He's an impetuous ninja cop who hangs with the wrong crowd. She's a vivacious 
hip-hop advertising executive in the wrong place at the wrong time. They fight 
crime!