Re: Plans for gnome-vfs replacement

[Alexander Larsson <alexl redhat com>]

On Mon, 2006-09-25 at 11:51 +0200, Tim Janik wrote:
> I think I see some confusion about the API abstraction layers here.
> > Consider the vfs as a switch for the filesystem layer.
> 
> jup, that's exactly what i do. in terms of the unix FS layer, this'd
> basically allow every app to provide a FUSE fs for all other apps,
> as long as it's running. but in a portable way, since this'll be provided
> by GVFS.
>
> > One of the vfs implementations would be a replacement for the code that
> > is currently in gnome-vfs. This would be used on most unix-based system,
> > and it will be pluggable similarly to gnome-vfs so that we can extend
> > the desktop with new types of file shares or whatever we come up with.
> > It would be possible for the gimp to extend this vfs implementation, but
> > not on the glib vfs switch level.
> 
> what level exactly would this be then?

The glib API (the part used by apps) is a consumer of VFS operations. It
abstracts the set of operations required to load, save and enumerate
files and information about files. Invisible to the application a
specific implementation of this vfs is picked when the vfs is used. The
implementation might be a simple local-files version, or it could be a
more complicated version using dbus to talk to a daemon that has
implementations of things like smb and ftp.

The main unix implementation (with the daemons and stuff) will
definately let you extend its namespace similar to how gnome-vfs lets
you add URI methods. However, the API to extend that vfs will be part of
that particular implementation and not part of the generic glib vfs API.

What this means is that if Gimp is running on a glib/gtk+ build that
only includes the local-files version of the vfs (or a hypothetical
win32-native vfs) then the gimp will not be able to use the glib APIs to
extend the vfs. 

Of course, none of this means that the Gimp can't create a GInputStream
subclass and use it internally however it wants.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
 Alexander Larsson                                            Red Hat, Inc 
                   alexl redhat com    alla lysator liu se 
He's a scarfaced albino stage actor fleeing from a secret government 
programme. She's a radical paranoid journalist with only herself to blame. 
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