Darren Kenny wrote: > Hi, > > I would like to get some discussion going on this topic as it really is a > point of concern for non-Linux users of GNOME... > > According to Robert Love[1] the prospect of FUSE replacing GNOME VFS was well > received at GUADEC. I was present, and took part from a Solaris standpoint, in > the discussion about this at Alex's talk about the future of GNOME VFS. > > I certainly didn't think that it was well received - more a controversial > change I would think. It seemed to me that there was a split in the room. > > OK, some people accepted that it is a possible solution to "legacy" > applications that are not opensource, but also unlikely to ever even consider > the possibility of using GNOME VFS - and I do tend to agree, from this > perspective but not in the way that is being suggested, i.e. to replace GNOME > VFS with FUSE.
Im a FUSE fanboy but I dont think you will see FUSE completely replace a VFS. For async operation you are going to need some kind of wrapper API which could provide suitable fallback to a legacy Gnome-VFS or other VFS systems. Ideally FUSE would be the main way with apps not requiring an async API (or unwilling to depened on a VFS ) being able to use it directly with POSIX calls if they so choose. It would be great if this wrapper API (and possibly a document centric API too) was in Glib. > > I don't see why we should push out a perfectly good GNOME VFS implementation, > with a rich API, to be replaced with a POSIX based file API that would result > in some weird uses of ioctl()s and the like to access meta-information. Not to > mention the kernel context switching that would result from such calls. > > I makes more sense to me to fix/address the "concerns" that people have with > the GNOME VFS API - and these mainly seem to be down to complexity - or a > thinking that it's too difficult to use - where does this come from? If it's > really like this, then it seems we need to provide a simple version of the > API for people that need it. The problems of ABI stability would limits the ability to correct current flaws. It also seems you cant even fully remove Bonobo dependency as a result of this so its going to make life difficult to maintain Gnome-vfs in the long run. Anyways, thats just my thoughts on the matter... -- Mr Jamie McCracken http://jamiemcc.livejournal.com/ _______________________________________________ gnome-vfs-list mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-vfs-list
