On Thu, 2008-02-07 at 10:29 -0500, Steve Grubb wrote: > > Now, Gnome (and many other things) start using fuse because it lets you > > implement very desireable features. > > What are these desirable features? Just curious since I may wind up doing a > lot of code review. There are many cases where you as a user want to access and/or modify something that contains files. For instance, loopback mounting iso files, easy access to network files for instance. There are several libraries that allows access to files in such ways, ranging from specific libraries like libext2fs.so to generic libraries like gnome-vfs and kio. However most apps don't use these interfaces so they can't access files like this. The standard way to access files is through the syscall interface, and then things must be mounted, meaning the implementation generally lives in the kernel with all the issues related to that. Some things like loopback mounting an iso is possible, but requires root access, even if the file is readable by the user. Other things are just not possible. However, with fuse these things can be solved. The filesystem implementation runs as the user, and user syscalls are proxied to the filesystem process via a pipe. This means that anything "filesystem like" that can be accessed from userspace can be accessed by all applications. So, for instance, you can get things like remote filesystem access via ssh, easily mountable network filesystems (smb, ftp, nfs) and user-mountable loopback mounts. The specific piece of code I'm using fuse for is gvfs, the replacement of gnome-vfs. Its a userspace virtual filesystem with backends for things like sftp, ftp, dav, smb, obexftp, etc. The file manager lets you easily browse these things, and apps that use the userspace API can load and save files there. However, if you want to open a file on a dav share in for instance emacs, then you have to use something like fuse. And in fact, if fuse is availible, gvfs will transparently convert uris to paths on a fuse mount to do this. -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
