a common VFS - a different approach

[Havoc Pennington]

On Tue, 2003-09-23 at 04:45, Alexander Larsson wrote:
> So, we are not in fact talking about a common vfs library, but rather a
> vfs implementation separate for each project, and a way to implement
> third party modules that can be used by both desktops?

This is what I originally meant, in
https://listman.redhat.com/archives/xdg-list/2003-September/msg00027.html

That's why I think it's a feasible approach. You have an evolutionary
path, rather than requiring huge breakage one day:

 - shared backend spec with extensible queryInterface() on each backend
 - implement support as a backend in gnome-vfs and kio
 - start adding backends in a shared code module, eventually covering 
   ftp, http, whatever
 - extend those backends with new interfaces as required to support 
   all the file manager functionality
 - eventually you could replace gnome-vfs with a smaller library that 
   simply chained to freedesktop.org backends

So you have a place to implement the bulk of the shared code, and define
the shared semantics, and you simultaneously create a well-defined ABI
for backends. You never have to change the ABI exposed to GNOME and KDE
apps; but if you wanted to, you could wait until you'd already been
using the bulk of the new implementation for a while and knew it would
be safe. You could test out the new implementation incrementally,
backend-by-backend.

Havoc