On Sat, Mar 10, 2001 at 03:15:15AM -0800, Kris Kennaway wrote:
> A few of us were talking on IRC tonight about how cool it would be to
> have an httpfs filesystem -- then it occurred to me we almost have
> this already, in the form of the (under-utilised) portalfs. Portalfs
> works by handing off everything to a userland daemon which handles the
> actual transaction request, so you could easily imagine extending it
> to provide an http method similar to the tcp method it currently has
> for initiating tcp connections.
>
> One could probably make this more generic and finish implementing the
> undocumented 'exec' method (which currently exists as a stub): this
> would run an administrator-specified command (i.e. fixed in
> /etc/portal.conf) and pipe the output back to the user.
>
> A fully navigable httpfs (e.g. one you can ls and cd around in) is
> more work and probably requires a full stacking layer, but this would
> still be pretty cool.
>
> Is anyone feeling inspired to implement this? :-)
OK, as I've mentioned in a private mail to Kris several hours after he
sent out this message, I've done some initial hacking on mount_portal
which lets me put:
http/ exec http/ /usr/bin/fetch fetch -q -o - http://$1-
into /etc/portal.conf, and then do cat /p/http/www.FreeBSD.org/handbook/
(the $1- part refers to path components below /p/http/; $1- means
'path components from 1 to last, separated by /')
The code still needs a lot of cleanup before I would dare submit it for
review and comments; my question is, should I bother^W^W^Wdoes this look
like a reasonable extension to mount_portal, or are there other ways/places
that such functionality should be implemented, if at all?
G'luck,
Peter
--
If the meanings of 'true' and 'false' were switched, then this sentence wouldn't be
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