cies' blog

in the recent kubuntu 6.10 announcement on the dot i found some complaints about the kio-slave system and the 'protocol' wild growth it has started. i read this complaint before, i guess it was on planetkde.

nice all those complaints, but what about a solution? i think a solution discussing is nicer, more positive, than a re-re-re-discussing a problem. so let me give it a shot. ;-)

it is mentioned that KDE should not solve this problem, but that it should be solved at a lower level. i agree since it is a problem that, for instance, GNOME (using VFS) and console apps. i didn't do a full literature research to see what solutions are out there -- i just want to push one: FUSE. yet FUSE needs some kind of wrapping to make it easily accessible by a GUI. maybe DBUS can come in handy here.

my suggestion: what about an 'icon' that you have somewhere -- like the cdrom icon -- that can be mounted/unmounted automatically or manually. this icon, when mounted, can just act as a FUSE folder: this way both KDE, GNOME, , console apps... everyone can use this!

what does it need?

i think the best way to do this is by freedesktop.org, since it uses DBUS. but concole apps need to be able to use it aswell. the file can just be a .desktop (XDG style) file, when mounted a directory by the same name (except for the .desktop ofcourse) is created where the FUSE FS is mounted; the magic-trick is that the file managers just show one icon only which is a 'special file' that is sometimes a directory. in console land we need a command to do this or an extention to mount.

example:

there is a file called "cies@breijs.com.desktop", it shows as an 'FS over SSH' connection icon, internally is is an XDG style text file. right-click -> properties on this icon shows me some additional info, i could also change the name of this 'icon'. double clicking opens the connection (the icon changes), and suddenly the 'icon file' is now a directory. below the surface a directory is created with the same name (minus the .desktop), yet both the directory and the icon show as one, at the new directory the FUSE-FS is mounted.

this is a solution to:
- the VFS KIO-slave incompatibility
- the fact that VFS and KIO-slaves don't work well with console apps.
- the wild growth of 'protocols' (media://, system://, etc.) in KDE
- iirc VFS also has issues


many KIO-slaves already have a similar implementation in FUSE. the whole thing just has to be wraped up by something that i don't yet exactly know what it will look like.

please treat this post as a request for comment on a idea, it is not yet fully materialized and i am deffinitly not the one who should make this kind of descisions. yet i had to come up with something contructive on this issue.