A common VFS and a Common conf-system [Part II]

[gtg990h at mail.gatech.edu]

> They can patch GCC if they don't like any of those solutions.  Nothing
> about D-VFS will make it impossible for non-desktop apps to use.  It's
> just not something that a whole ton of time is being devoted to.

That's not a very good answer. Like it or not, something like an IDE is a
legitimate use-case here. Or something like a MySQL front-end, or a number of
other applications in which 'desktop' and 'CLI' apps have to work together.
We're talking about UNIX desktops here --- CLI apps won't just go away, and its
useful to the user to allow them to work together.

> When FUSE equivalents are in BSD, Solaris, HP-UX, Cygwin, Irix, etc.,
> *then* it's worth taking into consideration.  Until then, FUSE is
> absolutely useless to D-VFS, unless we code some huge and massively
> different version just for Linux, which is both insane and pointless.

That's also not a good answer. Foisting a particular paradigm of file-access on
the user for the sake of portability is allowing implementation issues to affect
interface issues. Maybe a proper remote file access method is just not possible
on BSD, etc, at this time. That's their problem. Their problem should not burden
users on Linux.

> Unfortunately, the "namespace" is already fragmented.  Many apps already
> have their own built-in VFS systems, users are accoustomed to using many
> custom apps to access different kinds of remote shares, GNOME and KDE
> already have their VFS systems, etc.

The fact that it is already that way doesn't make it a good thing. The fact
gnome-vfs and KIO have their own weird view of the filesystem is something that
I've heard people complain about on several occasions. D-VFS is a chance to fix
that problem, instead of just perpetuating it.

> *unify* the VFS landscape by getting rid of the need to have a bazillion
> separate systems that all do essentially the same thing.

If you consider name unification to be a good thing, then D-VFS is broken from
the beginning. By design, it creates a second parallel namespace. From an
interface point of view, two vs four namespaces is no big deal. One vs two is an
enormous deal.