kioslaves/(passthrough&mount)

[Joost Baas]

Goodday,

This topic is somewhere between devel and users, but since I'm not a developer 
myself, and the users list is easier accessible, I'll just post it here.

I have been looking into the possibilities to access remote filesystems, 
especcially (s)ftp and samba. I see two possibilities, either you want to 
access small files on the remote fs, or you want to access large ones. In the 
first case, there's really not a problem using kioslaves, but in the second 
one this is often no good, since the files are being transferred as a whole 
in the background. This means movie streaming is not possible, and the client 
should have plenty free space.

The alternative to kioslaves is simple mounting by the kernel. In the case of 
smb, this would be done by smbmount, in the case of (s)ftp, we would probally 
want a solution in userspace, like fuse(.sourceforge.net). Being able to just 
pass it on to the kernel would also allow users to mount iso-images, which is 
just too much hassle to process with some app.

When looking in some discussions about this, I actually saw smb used to be 
handled this way (KDE2)! but then it had some disadvantages, so it became 
just a normal kioslave. While browsing into the source of the kio_smb I saw 
there are still references to smbmount! It's just not being used it seems, 
even though as far as I can see it's still linked into the kio_smb.so.

I realize this couldn't work the same on all platforms, it seems FreeBSD 
doesn't have the possibility to mount ftp shares for instance. However, on 
platforms where possibilities like these are available, it seems like a good 
idea.

What do other users, and the developers think of this? do we want this in 
KDE4?

greetings,
Joost Baas

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