Re: gvfs basic testing

[Alexander Larsson <alexl redhat com>]

On Tue, 2008-10-14 at 17:29 +0530, CM Reddy wrote:
> Hi 
> I have been working in gvfs for some time. But, I could not find much
> information on the NET. However, I downloaded gvfs-0-2.3 source package
> on my desktop (ununtu) and trying to test some of the gvfs commands to
> familiarize with GVFS architecture. 
> 
> However, I have no pointers on how to go about from this point. I just
> tried mounting the localtest, but it failed with the following error.
> 
> laptop:/usr/local/share/gvfs/mounts$ gvfs-mount localtest://
> Error mounting location: volume doesn't implement mount

Thats kinda weird. It works for me here. Maybe its because you installed
into /usr/local and something (like dbus maybe?) is not finding things
there?

> Our goal is to mount our own file system (gvfs) and integrate with our
> rest of the code.
> 
> Provide me some pointers for good documentation in GVFS, which will save
> my time in developing our own back-end program.

There are unfortunately not a lot of docs for writing backends atm. I'd
recommend looking at the existing backends for ideas of how it works.

The general setup is that there is a main daemon (gvfsd) that starts and
maintains a set of backend mount daemons that each handle one or more
mounts. You can also start the backends manually and they will conntect
to the main daemon as mounted, which is useful for debugging. You do
this by starting the backend binary giving it the mount-spec
information, which is a set of key-value settings that specifies what to
mount (details differ per mount type).