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

[Michael Meeks <michael ximian com>]

Hi Alex,

On Wed, 2002-03-27 at 16:42, Alex Larsson wrote:
> > 	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?

	Yes - relatively trivially - we should do this for gconf too. But it
needs new API and is thus a Gnome 2.2 thing. [ as would be any vfs slave
process ]. The only worry I have is that it re-orders methods; but it's
hardly a serious problem - we wouldn't use ref counting for the IO
daemon anyway I imagine. I also plan / hope to add an API that allows us
to queue certain incoming requests until idle - since this seems to be a
commonly used pattern in various bits of software.

> > 	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. :)

	Really ? no idea about that.

> 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.

	Well - it seems to me that if we used CORBA / some de-coupled
technology we could make smb a standard part of gnome-vfs even for
non-GPLd apps; whether that's a good thing I don't know but it might be
a useful option.

	Anyway - just a long term thought [ since these seem to be popular at
this time ;-]

	Regards,

		Michael.

-- 
 mmeeks gnu org  <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot