[Portland] PortlandVFSProposal

[Dmitry M. Shatrov]

On Sat, 2006-01-07 at 08:04 -0800, Dan Kegel wrote: 
> On systems where the kernel has those three bits all working well
> together, Gnome and KDE's VFS layers should shrink
> to simple convenience wrappers, and all apps regardless
> of whether they're Gnome or KDE or something else
> will be able to use the userspace VFS services.
> And that's the way it ought to be.

Agree. For example, smbfs module in the Linux kernel and userspace SMB
implementations that GNOME and KDE use are all not functional enough:

* The only implementation that is fast enough to watch a movie over the
network on a 1Ghz PC is in-kernel smbfs
* Although suid-binary 'smbmount' allows to mount SMB shares without
root privileges the only way to perform a forced unmount is with
'umount' ('smbumount' does not help) which requires root. If a stale
host's share is kept mounted then the desktop is unusable: both nautilus
and konqueror hang.

So if I want to watch a movie or to play some music from local network I
have to download first.. arrgh..

Not to say that code duplication like this is just a waste of time.
Thanks god there is a working "SMB for FUSE" implementation. FUSE is on
its way to FreeBSD too: http://fuse4bsd.creo.hu/ It is even in ports
already.

Wbr, Dmitry