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

[David Faure]

On Sunday 01 November 2009, Luciano Montanaro wrote:
> 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.

Yes, *a few*.
Everything else is just screwed on such "mounts".

>  GUI driven applications need something like KIO,
>  sure. But the two features are orthogonal.

I completely disagree. Every single GUI application out there assumes that for 
local files it can use blocking API, because local files are fast enough for 
that. Changing the assumption simply breaks everything.

> > 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.

Just try it:
  kioclient cat http://example.org

I'm happy to implement "kioclient ls" if that makes anyone happy ;-)

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