[PATCH] Multi-Protocol IO-Slave

Vlad vladc6 at yahoo.com
Mon Jan 14 03:30:00 GMT 2008


--- Jeff Mitchell <kde-dev at emailgoeshere.com> wrote:
> On Sunday 13 January 2008, nf2 wrote:
> "One complaint about GnomeVFS is that mount points cannot be
> accessed by 
> non-GnomeVFS-aware applications. GVFS uses a FUSE bridge to make
> these 
> publicly accessible...This FUSE bridge makes it possible for
> literally any 
> application to use GVFS, even if it is not aware of it."
> 
> Perhaps something to consider for KIO in the future?

KioFuse allows all apps (Firefox, OpenOffice, bash scripts, etc) to
access KIO-based files through the traditional POSIX API:

http://techbase.kde.org/index.php?title=Projects/KioFuse
http://websvn.kde.org/trunk/playground/libs/kiofuse/

There are issues that still need to be resolved in KioFuse, notably
integrating it into the KNetAttach GUI. For a full list, please see
the TODO file.

Now for some general thoughts on KIO:

KIO's API is great, but a drawback is that it's only accessible to the
main thread (GUI thread if the app has a GUI). Some KDE developers
have pointed to other deficiencies in KIO that have dissuaded them
from working on existing IO slaves. For example, KFTP
(http://www.kde-apps.org/content/show.php?content=15343) uses its own
abstraction for FTP and SFTP access instead of the FTP and SFTP KIO
slaves. KFTP's author explains his reasoning here:

http://dot.kde.org/1196818371/1196822000/1196849333/

SMB4K (http://smb4k.berlios.de) has similarly chosen to forgo the SMB
KIO slave. 

I think we should include these KDE developers in the discussion about
how they would like the KIO API to be changed so that it fits the
needs of their users. Before we attempt cross-desktop integration, it
might be easier to first get all KDE devs using and improving the same
codebase.

Best regards,
Vlad


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