KDE is not an OS platform... (And neither is Gnome)

[David Faure]

On Saturday 31 October 2009, Luciano Montanaro wrote:
> On venerdì 30 ottobre 2009, David Faure wrote:
> > On Friday 30 October 2009, Benoit Jacob wrote:
> > > 1) Make sure that both KIO and GVFS can be mounted into the OS's native
> > >  VFS. 2) Make it so that KIO and GVFS agree on a filesystem layout (a
> > > "name mangling" if you want) so that the same filename can be used
> > > regardless of the choice of KIO or GVFS. By a "name mangling" i mean a
> > > translation from addresses like "sftp://user@server/path" to addresses
> > > like "/mountpoint/ssh/user/server/path".
> >
> > Please keep in mind the difference between sync and async APIs.
> >
> > You download a file over FTP. KIO is async: the application remains
> >  responsive, you get a progress dialog. The "native VFS" is most of the
> >  time used in a blocking way. fopen,fwrite,fclose. Which means the
> >  application freezes until the FTP server sends the whole data. Not good.
> > A remote filesystem is NOT like the local filesystem.
> 
> Well, the filesystem calls are synchronous, yes, but that's not a problem
>  for the file:// kioslave, is it?

Right. But my point is that people saying "by mounting stuff into the filesystem
we can allow even non-KDE non-Gnome applications to benefit from kioslaves"
are omitting the fact that those non-kde non-gnome applications would then
use synchronous API, and would block for a very long time.
So a KIO-like API is needed. So mounting things into a filesystem mountpoint 
doesn't get you anything.

-- 
David Faure, faure at kde.org, http://www.davidfaure.fr
Sponsored by Nokia to work on KDE, incl. Konqueror (http://www.konqueror.org).