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

[David Faure]

On Wednesday 04 November 2009, Luciano Montanaro wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 3, 2009 at 7:54 PM, David Faure <faure at kde.org> wrote:
> >>  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.
> 
> I was not not thinking of GUI applications specifically. But even GUI
> applications would read synchronously from an nfs mounted partition,
> and what could we do about it?

Nothing. And that situation sucks from a user's perspective: the whole app
freezes for a good 5 minutes if the NFS server is offline.
Do we really want to expand this behavior to all remote folders?

> Also USB devices and CDROMs could be sources of problems, and
> applications would already see them as part of the common filesystem
> namespace.

These do not freeze for 5 minutes.

> > Just try it:
> >  kioclient cat http://example.org
> 
> I know about that. But from the user point of view, if there network
> is shaky, cat kioexec cat will block too...

But they can Ctrl+C it and regain control.
Compare with NFS-mounted dirs, which I have seen block command-line tools
for 5 good minutes, without any way to regain control because the program is 
inside a kernel syscall.

> > I'm happy to implement "kioclient ls" if that makes anyone happy ;-)
> 
> I'd find it useful, but it would be a nice exercise in kio
> programming, probably. :)

Yep.

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