A virtual filesystem standard

[George Staikos]

On Friday 05 September 2003 00:12, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> On Fri, Sep 05, 2003 at 05:17:11AM +0200, Vincent Wagelaar wrote:
> > Is there any work being done on a standard VFS implementation that is
> > desktop neutral? It would be great if all applications could be made
> > VFS-aware.
>
> Not that I know of. Some people at Nove Hrady had a cool idea for how
> to approach this, which was to define a way to write an out-of-process
> VFS backend. In other words, you would define a protocol and way to
> launch an executable to use that executable as a VFS backend.
> There would be a conventional place to install a VFS backend binary
> and some kind of metadata file describing the features the backend
> provided, name of the backend, etc.
>
> The reason this is a cool approach is that then multiple parties can
> drop in backends and the backends can link to any kind of library.
> The backends are fully encapsulated.

  This could make certain things such as SSL support really difficult to 
properly implement.  SSL is already extremely difficult to get right with 
kioslaves, and it's basically woven throughout a "TCPSlaveBase" class which 
includes inline GUI code and GUI callbacks.  Yes it can be done, but I think 
it's quite a challenge to get right.  Hopefully it wouldn't result in a 
monstrosity of an implementation along the lines of OpenLDAP.

-- 
George Staikos
KDE Developer				http://www.kde.org/
Staikos Computing Services Inc.		http://www.staikos.net/