Re: [Nautilus-list] Re: gnorpm?

[Glen Gray <glen antefacto com>]

On Wed, 2002-03-27 at 15:49, Michael Meeks wrote:
> 	gnome-vfs has traditionally been absolutely terrible with compound
> in-file systems, currently it doesn't seem to handle pkzip / tar.gz at
> all. (well?)
> 

This seems to come up every other day on the list/IRC. This REALLY needs
to be looked at. I know it was probably the first and biggest gripe I
had about Nautilus as a file manager. The more and more this comes up
the more high priority it is. I'm not on the list that long but I know
lots of people join, claim that this missing feature is a major headache
and proclaim their intention to remedy it and then we hear no more. I
think as a group we need to make a concerted effort to look at this HIGH
priority for a 2.1 release.

> 	Embarrassing I think, especially since Windows XP handles pkzip files,
> seemingly as quickly as it does it's own native file system [ discovered
> that the other day ].
> 
> 	The solution for gnome-vfs goes like this I think:
> 
> 	a) provide some sensible (prolly internal to start with) CORBA
> 	   interfaces for the level of file detail gnome-vfs exposes
> 	   [ based on the bonobo-stream/storage ones perhaps ]
> 
> 	b) for compound files farm the processing off to a single out of
> 	   proc VFS process that can arbitrate multiple access / locking
> 	   multiple writes, handle a single in-memory cache, and deal 
> 	   with the misc. evil issues that arise trying to poke inside 
> 	   large archives on non-seekable media etc. etc. ;-)
> 
> 	So - if anyone wants to do this / thinks they have a better plan,
> please let me know.
>

I currently don't know enough about the bonobo/CORBA/gnome-vfs framework
to provide anything useful on this...yet. 
One idea that's probably rubbish or it would have been done already, is
to snarf the gmc vfs code that dealt with this and implement it via
gnome-vfs either as an out or proc process as Michael suggests or by
taking the mechanism and implementing it via gnome-vfs internally.
 
-- 
_______________________________________
Glen Gray             Software Engineer
a n t e f a c t o     t: +353 1 8586006
www.antefacto.com     f: +353 1 8586014
181 Parnell Street - Dublin 1 - Ireland