On Thu, 30 Jun 2005 19:10:57 +0200, David Weinehall <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> said:
> For the analogy to be complete: > User has a file browser (say Nautilus) > The file browser sees the userland VFS (say a unified VFS between > GNOME and KDE) > The VFS sees the real file system I would say that this only works if everyone is forced to use the same VFS. In the web example, everyone is forced to use the same API (HTTP), and so everyone gets the same view. For the real filesystem, not everyone is forced to use the hypothetical unified GNOME/KDE VFS. So if I try to edit with gedit or kate, I get something different than if I try to edit with vi or emacs. As I see it: web browser <-> Nautilus/user apps web server <-> filesystem web server's filesystem/database/etc. <-> physical disk storage Of course, we all know that analogies are not perfect. The layering in both sides isn't exactly the same. And other people could assign different equivalences (e.g. web browser <-> Nautilus/user apps; web server <-> VFS; web server's filesystem <-> filesystem). Anyways, the analogy wasn't supposed to be about where to handle the magic extra functionality, whether userspace or kernel space. The analogy was for people who might think that it's stupid to return foo/.data when the user tries to open the directory foo; it was meant to illustrate that that idea isn't completely braindead. > This way the userland VFS can be ported to almost any platform. I think GNOME and KDE will always need a VFS if it wants to be cross-platform. But I think that if the kernel provides extra functionality, GNOME may be better off. For example, glib provides its own threading abstraction. But on systems that use pthreads, glib's threading library uses it for its implementation. And I think it can even be used on systems that don't offer threading, by doing its own emulation of threading. > When toying around on the desktop, an abstraction of what a file is > works fine with me. When doing serious work (programming, tar:ing up > stuff, etc) I want to be bloody sure that I see the files in the same > way always. I don't want surprises such as files suddenly behaving as > directories or vice versa. -- Hubert Chan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> - http://www.uhoreg.ca/ PGP/GnuPG key: 1024D/124B61FA Fingerprint: 96C5 012F 5F74 A5F7 1FF7 5291 AF29 C719 124B 61FA Key available at wwwkeys.pgp.net. Encrypted e-mail preferred.
