[Nautilus-list] Re: [GNOME VFS] Re: More GNOME VFS abstraction

[Ettore Perazzoli <ettore helixcode com>]

Hi Pavel,

    Pavel> One thing I think is very important is for your abstract
    Pavel> design to still allow for optimal performance of the
    Pavel> different modules when doing things like file copy
    Pavel> operations, displaying a large number of files in a shell
    Pavel> window, etc.

  Uhm, in the specific case of copying maybe there should be a special
function in the access method's vtable to make a copy of an "inode",
i.e. create a new file with the same properties as the original one.

  As for the block size, we already have that property in GNOME VFS...
And I don't think it should go away with the new design.

    Pavel> In the case of a file system module, your
    Pavel> GnomeVFSPropertyBag would be queried to find out if it
    Pavel> represents a file system and if so, a GnomeVFSFileInfo -
    Pavel> like structure could be returned to expose stat info and
    Pavel> other Posix-style file system interfaces.

  You can still have the POSIX-style attributes in the property bag.

    Pavel> GnomeVFSPropertyBag objects should be small and suitable as
    Pavel> cache items

  I agree they should be small, although maybe you don't want to keep
them around that much.

    Pavel> At some point we will hopefully have an inode monitoring
    Pavel> mechanism that will send notices when files change
    Pavel> (fam/imon look promising).

  Yes.  I have always wanted to do that.  It's one of the other things
that I had to drop because of other work.

  The main issue here is how to emulate this (almost) reliably in
GNOME VFS when things like fam/imon are not available.

-- 
Ettore