Re: [GNOME VFS] Re: [Nautilus-list] Re: gnorpm?

[Alex Larsson <alexl redhat com>]

On 27 Mar 2002, Michael Meeks wrote:

> Hi Michele,
> 
> On Wed, 2002-03-27 at 09:10, Michele Campeotto wrote:
> >   I Nautilus ever going to have that (awesome!) (g)mc's feature where
> > you can navigate an RPM (or whatever archive you choose) just like a
> > file system? I thought gnome-vfs would have handled this...
> 
> 	gnome-vfs has traditionally been absolutely terrible with compound
> in-file systems, currently it doesn't seem to handle pkzip / tar.gz at
> all. (well?)
> 
> 	Embarrassing I think, especially since Windows XP handles pkzip files,
> seemingly as quickly as it does it's own native file system [ discovered
> that the other day ].

It is embarrassing.
 
> 	The solution for gnome-vfs goes like this I think:
> 
> 	a) provide some sensible (prolly internal to start with) CORBA
> 	   interfaces for the level of file detail gnome-vfs exposes
> 	   [ based on the bonobo-stream/storage ones perhaps ]

Hmmm. I'm somewhat afraid of how this will make gnome-vfs calls suddenly 
reenter your corba code. That certainly wasn't the case before and will 
probably break apps in subtle, hard to fix ways. :( 

Can you tell orbit to do a synchronous call and not process any messages 
other than the reply?

> 	b) for compound files farm the processing off to a single out of
> 	   proc VFS process that can arbitrate multiple access / locking
> 	   multiple writes, handle a single in-memory cache, and deal 
> 	   with the misc. evil issues that arise trying to poke inside 
> 	   large archives on non-seekable media etc. etc. ;-)

Thats probably the right thing to do. Sounds like a kio-slave though. :)

We have other problems that require gnome-vfs processes also. For instance  
keeping passwords around so that you don't have to re-enter e.g. smb 
passwords all the time.

-- 
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
 Alexander Larsson                                            Red Hat, Inc 
                   alexl redhat com    alla lysator liu se 
He's a notorious alcoholic cowboy on the edge. She's a violent cigar-chomping 
angel trying to make a difference in a man's world. They fight crime!