Integrating support for GNOME VFS into glibc

[Nicholas Allen <nick allen onlinehome de>]

Hi,

I think it would be great if GNOME VFS support could be integrated into glibc. 
This would allow existing applications to make use of GNOME VFS without 
needing to be modified or even recompiled. Thus in bash I could 'cd 
http://slashdot.org' for 
example.

There are a number of ways of doing this. One would be to obverride the 
required libc functions (open, read etc)  and use LD_PRELOAD to override 
them. I tried this solution but my overridden functions are never called for 
some reason (may be I am doing something wrong?).

Another approach would be to hack it directly into the glibc source code and 
add a configure option for it.

What do you think of this idea? I suggested this idea to the glibc maintainers 
and Richard Stallman thought it would be a good idea to contact this list as 
well.

Anyone like this idea or can anyone see any reasons why it wouldn't be 
feasable.

Thanks

Nicholas Allen