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

[David Faure]

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.

Anyone who has ever had an NFS mount to a host that goes offline will certainly 
see what I'm talking about (the shell being blocked for 5 minutes after each 
command; GUI apps freezing for a very long time when trying to load/save/list 
a directory...).

"KDE is not an OS platform"? If that means KDE doesn't provide kernel 
filesystems for remote directories, I would say that's rather good.

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