Re: Plans for gnome-vfs replacement

[Alexander Larsson <alexl redhat com>]

On Tue, 2006-09-19 at 16:24 -0400, Hans Petter Jansson wrote:
> 
> Of course, not all applications need such functionality, but that's
> just a matter of wrapping this in a higher-level, more rigid API.

In my reading of code using gnome-vfs i haven't seen a single use of
anything like this. Could you perhaps describe some real-life examples
of how/where this would be used?

>From just reading your post, without deeper insight into what you mean I
would be hesitant to add something like that to glib. Its not clear that
applications need it, and its not clear the the solution we create is
good enough for the applications that need something like it (in fact, I
think its likely that such apps want to do their own thing).

Furthermore, its not a well understood area, and as such I think its a
bad idea to try to integrate with the basic platform that has guaranteed
stability and high quality requirements. Having it as a library outside
glib makes it possible to experiment with and develop the idea. 

Your comparison to gstreamer makes me especially worried. While the
gstreamer model has been approximately the same all the time the exact
details have been tweaked and developed over many many years, and its
not until quite recently they seem to have got things really right. We
cannot afford anything like that in glib.

As long as you can get an asynchronous source and sink from the vfs
layer I don't see anything that prohibits a library like this outside of
glib to use the vfs layer.

> Also, what's your thinking on supporting asynchronous DNS lookups,
> representing IP addresses, TCP/UDP sockets, etc? We currently don't
> have any clear platform solution for that.

These are interesting questions, and some applications would surely
benefit from such code (although others will consider it bloat). I don't
want to intermix these questions with the vfs layer though. They are not
really strongly related, only TCP sockets are slightly related to
streams, and not really in a very interesting way (its just another
possible stream implementation).

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
 Alexander Larsson                                            Red Hat, Inc 
                   alexl redhat com    alla lysator liu se 
He's a globe-trotting zombie househusband haunted by memories of 'Nam. She's a 
cold-hearted renegade nun with an incredible destiny. They fight crime!