VFS ramblings

[Ken Deeter]

> 
> My personal interest is to have a solution for mounting user home directories
> over ssh that works on multiple platforms (ideally, the user logs in through *dm
> and is authenticated through ssh - I guess this might involve pam too), although
> I realize this is a bit below the concern of the desktop environment.  But it
> does seem that some sort of standard, cross platform system for doing VFS and
> related authentication would help the desktop environments as well.
> 
> Unfortunately I've only started following the VFS emails today, and I'm not the
> most experienced guy in the desktop environment space.  I might be missing out
> on some things or be completely off-base on others.  So why did I post my little
> ramble here?  Well if nothing else, I thought it'd be worthwhile to bring up the
> 'lufs' project, as well as talk at a big picture level a bit.
>

Someone, beat you to it ;-)

I think in general, the discussion on this list has stayed away from the 'mounting' idea,
for several reasons:

a) it gets too platform specific. kernel modules for all the kernels we
want to run on.

b) we are also talking about things like start-here: and preferences:
that don't reall make sense to be put in the filesystem (well, i guess
that depends on who you ask)

c) permissions for mounting

The main reason you woudl want to put it at the kernel-vfs level is that
you don't have to write a whole new API. But if everyone is willing to
switch api's, then there really isn't much point putting it down in the
kernel.. it just gives us more to deal with.

Now that doesn't mean, one couldn't write a kernel xdg-vfs module... ;-)
But i'm not sure you'd get much support for it at the cross-platform
application level. you could still probably do your mounting a
filesystem over vfs kind of deal if you wanted though.


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 +----------------------------------------------+
(  Ken Deeter (Kentarou SHINOHARA)             (
 )                                              )
(  "If only God were alive to see this.. "     (
 )                             -Homer Simpson   )
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