Re: Integrating support for GNOME VFS into glibc

[Magnus Bergman <magnus bergman observer net>]

On Fri, 17 Dec 2004 15:09:15 +0100
Nicholas Allen <nick allen onlinehome de> wrote:

> >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?

I read an explanation of a specific problem about a year ago (then I has
ideas very similar to yours). I no longer remember it, but it was quite
convincing. I'm not sure if it was discussed on this list, but if it
was, you should be able to find it by search for posts by me.