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

[Luciano Montanaro]

On domenica 01 novembre 2009, David Faure wrote:
> 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.

But that is fine for a few classes of applications. Non interactive 
applications, scripts etc. wait anyway for their data and can use the simpler 
synchronous api. GUI driven applications need something like KIO, sure. But 
the two features are orthogonal. 

> So a KIO-like API is needed.

I was not discussing that.

> So mounting things into a filesystem
>  mountpoint doesn't get you anything.

If it gets me the ability to cat http://example.org
or ls audiocd://ogg/ (with the proper adjustments, obviously like 
/kio/audiocd://ogg or even ) I would not sneer at it.

Luciano



-- 
Luciano Montanaro //
                \X/ mikelima at cirulla.net