Re: VFS integration with kernel mounts

[Alexander Larsson <alexl redhat com>]

On Tue, 2007-05-01 at 22:34 -0500, Jerry Haltom wrote:
> I've been reading back in the discussion this February, about GVFS and
> Alex's design and such. Read the postings about legacy VFS integration
> and creating a Fuse mount point into GVFS at ~/.mount or similar. I find
> that really interesting.
> 
> What about the reverse? Are we going to use file:/// to access NFS
> directories and in-kernel CIFS mounts? Or is an abstraction going to be
> provided around these where appropriate? Or are we simply going to not
> touch on the problem?

I'm not sure what you mean. Access to such files would be through the
GFile apis, and will result in normal posix calls.

> What about auto mounting things such as USB devices? Are we going to
> have an abstraction around those, where you could refer to device by
> uuid or something?
> 
> `uuid-of-device://path/to/file`
> 
> Or are we simply going to consider it `file:///media/usbdisk-1/` and
> stuff like we do now? I really like the abstraction idea. It would
> basically be a GVFS mountable that just did whatever pmount work was
> necessary to get the device mounted, the proxy to the kernel VFS.

I haven't planned anything like this. There is an abstraction similar to
gnome-volume-monitor for enumerating the devices, but once they are
mounted we refer to them as in the filesystem. 

> Then what about arbitrary FUSE file systems? Is it an acceptable
> solution to write a fuse GVFS backend which auto-mounts?

Not sure what you mean. gvfs backends can support mount on demand if
that is what you want. But fuse mounts are not really different than any
other kind of mounted filesystem, what special needs do you have?

> How should the translation from GVFS URI to POSIX path be handled? A
> `posix-path` property on a GFile? It should mount in ~/.mount if it was
> a pure-GVFS file system, or return the real underlying kernel path if
> it's just wrapped?

I'm not sure what you mean, generally file: uris map to POSIX paths, and
no other do.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
 Alexander Larsson                                            Red Hat, Inc 
                   alexl redhat com    alla lysator liu se 
He's a notorious vegetarian vagrant looking for a cure to the poison coursing 
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