Re: Plans for gnome-vfs replacement

[Tim Janik <timj imendio com>]

On Wed, 20 Sep 2006, Alexander Larsson wrote:

> Here is my current GInputStream:
>
> struct _GInputStreamClass
> {
>  GObjectClass parent_class;
>
>  /* Sync ops: */
>
>  gssize   (* read)        (GInputStream *stream,
> 			    void         *buffer,
> 			    gsize         count,
> 			    GError      **error);
>  gssize   (* skip)        (GInputStream *stream,
> 			    gsize         count,
> 			    GError      **error);
>  gboolean (* close)	   (GInputStream *stream,
> 			    GError      **error);
>
>  /* Async ops: (optional in derived classes) */
>  guint    (* read_async)  (GInputStream  *stream,
> 			    void               *buffer,
> 			    gsize               count,
> 			    int                 io_priority,
> 			    GMainContext       *context,
> 			    GAsyncReadCallback  callback,
> 			    gpointer            data,
> 			    GDestroyNotify      notify);
>  guint    (* close_async) (GInputStream  *stream,
> 			    GMainContext       *context,
> 			    GAsyncCloseCallback callback,
> 			    gpointer            data,
> 			    GDestroyNotify      notify);
>  void     (* cancel)      (GInputStream  *stream,
> 			    guint               tag);
> }
>
> GInputStream objects can optionally also implement the GSeekable
> interface to support seeking and truncating. This is your basic
> syncronous read API with an addition of some async calls. If a derived
> class doesn't implement the async calls the baseclass will emulate them
> using threads (similar to how gnome-vfs works now). GOutputStream is
> similar, without the skip method, but with a flush method added.

hm, in your initial proposal, you said that apps don't currently have control
over whether they want to use/care about threading or not. so, are you
planning for a way to use the GVFS API without threading under the hood?
then, emulation of the above asny calls would be implemented in terms of
IO handlers attached to the provided GMainContext *context?
and, does it really make sense to have individual GMainContexts per
async operations?
since you have a statefull object already, wouldn't something
like this be better:

void	g_input_stream_set_async_context (GInputStream *stream,
                                          GMainContext *context);
void	g_input_stream_async_read        (GInputStream *stream,
                                          uint8        *buffer,
                                          ...);
i.e. here you'd essentially force users to set_async_context() before
any of the g_input_stream_async_*() ops could be called.

> =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
> Alexander Larsson                                            Red Hat, Inc
>                   alexl redhat com    alla lysator liu se

---
ciaoTJ