Re: VFS integration with kernel mounts

[David Zeuthen <david fubar dk>]

On Wed, 2007-05-02 at 14:58 +0200, Alexander Larsson wrote:
> On Wed, 2007-05-02 at 00:19 -0400, David Zeuthen wrote:
> 
> > This should be a piece of cake to do (assuming HAL) and if people think
> > it's a good idea (I'm not entirely convinced it is) I'd be happy to take
> > a stab at it when GVFS is ready for this. Alex?
> 
> I'm not really convinced it is a good idea. Seems a bit fragile and
> bound to case trouble in various edge cases. Aliasing filenames is
> always problematic, so is using filenames in a non-canonical way that
> not all apps support.

But isn't the deal, with taking FUSE into account, that apps need to
deal with at least two references to a file _anyway_? I mean, one that
is the GVFS URL e.g.

 1. smb:///server-hook/path/to/file

and one that can be used with POSIX e.g.

 2. /home/davidz/.mounts/smb-server-hook-32132/path/to/file

that is just a FUSE mount maintained by the GVFS daemon?

In other words, I'm saying you _already_ need things like this for GVFS
specific file system drivers... meaning you need to translate from 1. to
2. at least (and possibly back). So what's the big deal of having GVFS
recognize

 media-1234:///path/to/file/on/usbstick

and just make libgvfs look up /media/raptor (or whatever) and use POSIX
IO from there to actually read /media/raptor/path/to/file/on/usbstick.

The whole point here is that GVFS aware apps, like gedit, Totem,
Nautilus, F-Spot, Rhythmbox or whatever, can store 

 media-1234:///path/to/file/on/usbstick

in e.g. the recent file list, desktop file, media database etc. and
actually, for free, have libgvfs (via the GVFS daemon) prompt the user
to insert the media with the file in question if it's not available?

(For example, that's a huge boon for me since I keep all my photos on an
external USB harddisk and it's not fun to start F-Spot without the disk
mounted. It's also not fun when mounting the disk elsewhere.)

Or maybe I'm missing something? Feel free to tell me to read docs and/or
the code if my question is stupid and the answer already lies there.
Thanks!

     David