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

[Benoit Jacob]

2009/10/30 Benoit Jacob <jacob.benoit.1 at gmail.com>:
> 2009/10/30 David Faure <faure at kde.org>:
>> 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.
>
> Thanks, I was missing this part (that the problem lies in the way that
> applications use it).

(sorry, i hit "send" a bit too fast)

But Linux 2.6 has an async I/O API already,
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-async/

Of course I understand that this wasn't available when KIO was designed!

You make a good point that apps would need to be adapted to do async
I/O but that's not KDE's fault ;)

I just would like to understand if there's a real reason anymore for
not letting KIO/GVFS go through the native VFS on Linux (and perhaps
other *nix). Again, on other exotic platforms, the statu quo seems
good enough.

Benoit