Re: Integrating support for GNOME VFS into glibc

[Nicholas Allen <nick allen onlinehome de>]

>From what I understand the problem is this: GNOME VFS (or any other
>
> similar virtual filesystem) can not provide full POSIX compliance since
> many protocols simply doesn't support it. So this would break the POSIX
> compliance of glibc and most likely a considerable amount of
> applications relying on it. Another reason might be that many people
> like to keep most of their system (including GNOME VFS and all its
> dependencies) on a partition not available on boot-time (often located
> on another host). It would be quite inconvenient with all those extra
> dependencies even to /sbin/init.

That's why I was thinking of using LD_PRELOAD to do it - to keep the 
dependancies out of glibc. Another approach would be that glibc used dlopen 
and dlsym so there would be no hard dependancy - It would make use of it if 
it was installed otherwise not.

I realize that VFS is not posix compliant but I think that it should be 
possible to emulate features that are missing from VFS that are required by 
POSIX and also if it can't be emulated then to set errno to the most 
appropriate error.

Do you know of any specific problems that couldn't be addressed?

Nicholas Allen