[Portland] PortlandVFSProposal

[Philip Van Hoof]

On Sat, 2006-01-07 at 14:17 +0100, Diego Calleja wrote:

> FUSE is a kernel VFS <-> userspace layer which allows to create userspace
> filesystems in a safe way. You can use C and there're bindings for
> C#, Java, python, ruby, haskell, perl, bash scripts, ocaml...

The idea is nice, however. A problem is that unless I add the mount
point to fstab, I need super user privileges to mount a filesystem!

I picked a random one, the sshfs one . . . guessing the sshfs one is a
good reference.

pvanhoof at lort:~$ mkdir t
pvanhoof at lort:~$ sshfs user at hostname: t
Password:
fuse: failed to exec fusermount: Permission denied
pvanhoof at lort:~$

I already saw there's a KIOSLAVE that uses FUSE, I could help with
adapting gnome-vfs to utilise FUSE. But it wouldn't be, at all, useful
if it required super user privileges.

You see .. a desktop doesn't run using super user privileges. Unless
you're desktop is called Microsoft Windows 95, of course.

I wonder whether it'd be 'secure' to allow users to mount FUSE file
system. I'm guessing it can be done in the fuse kernel module, right?

I'm also wondering how platform independent this can be. It should, for
example, also work on Microsoft Windows. You see, many desktop
applications are being ported from and to Windows. 

For a successful adoption, some crucial examples are OpenOffice.Org,
Mozilla's Firefox but also some popular GNOME and KDE applications being
ported or already ported to desktop platforms like Windows.

Will the FUSE team devote it's to to building the same infrastructure on
the many Microsoft Windows operating system versions? Preferable in at
least a API compatible way, of course.

Will the FUSE team also target the many mobile platforms and devices?


The desktop isn't "just" GNU/Linux on a i386 compatible computer.



-- 
Philip Van Hoof, software developer at x-tend 
home: me at pvanhoof dot be 
gnome: pvanhoof at gnome dot org 
work: vanhoof at x-tend dot be 
http://www.pvanhoof.be - http://www.x-tend.be