system and desktop VFS merged

[Diego Calleja]

El Sun, 27 Mar 2005 22:32:59 +0300 (EEST),
rosen georgiev <dewie at abv.bg> escribió:

> i didn't say that right, here is anothe try:
> D-VFS will be crossplatfrom, but the connectivity with non-desktop apps 
> will be available only on Linux throught FUSE-DVFS or something similar.

Why is freedesktop trying to do something that doesn't really belongs to the desktop
folks, except in the GUIs needed to configure/worke with it? Why should freedesktop waste
extra time trying to implement features that really belong to the OS layer (kernel/libc/etc) just
because not all operative systems support userspace filesystems? Is not that happening
already with some features, ie: will freedesktop define a standard for creating a configurate
tool to configure the kernel just because some OS don't supports one or the available
ones aren't well done?

FUSE seems to be a step ahead in the idea of "userspace filesystems", and it's the Right
Thing (tm) - even if some people argues about posix not being enought, etc - to do as has
been proven with operative systems like plan9...

The idea of /vfs/protocol is just against the idea of userspace filesystems. I mean, the
whole purpose of a userspace filesystem should be being *completely* transparent
If you're going to do /vfs/protocol, what's the point in using the filesystem namespace for
it, except for tyding it? What would be next, require the path to be in valid utf-8?

The main issue with FUSE seems to be that it isn't "cross platform". This is easily
solvable: if a OS don't supports userspace filesystems, they won't have userspace
filesystems...what else can you do? (and anyway, is one of the design goals of
dragonflybsd: people IS getting there...) Is not just about getting the userspace 
filesystem path name in bash, creating a D-VFS standard would require that EVERY
app would implement it (from apache to libc) to be really coherent. Filesystem
namespace is something that affects all apps, I don't really see why it should be
specified by desktop people...