io-slave design-problem

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io-slave design-problem
by ben on Wednesday 11/Apr/2007, @15:11

I really like where KDE and its libraries are going. Except for the ioslaves.

It is becoming very obvious that ioslaves do not belong into kde/gnome/openoffice, but at least one layer deeper than that. They should be part of linux, available everywhere, so that commands like "less http://kdenews.org" become possible.

I guess that there is some good reason why this has never happened, but the current state really sucks!

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Re: io-slave design-problem
by michael on Thursday 12/Apr/2007, @02:27

The main problem is that it gets a lot more difficult to implement at a deeper layer. Even now ioslaves have some complex issues to solve.

One of them is that most interresting ioslaves may require user interaction.
lets say "less http://kdenews.org" actually works but the given URL requires authentication. "less" obviously can't handle that, so what will?

What about progress bars? Even small files may take a long time to access. And in many cases "download, work locally, upload" is the only reasonable approach to work with a file.

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Re: io-slave design-problem
by Philipp on Thursday 12/Apr/2007, @04:07

I'm pretty much sure all of the issues can be solved.

It would just need a deeper interaction between a generic library and the above DE / applications. Even the mentioned interactions can be done.

For sure it is a huge task getting it done in a way every DE / app is accepting it and the flexibility in adding new / adjusting current IO-slaves from one to another KDE version is gone. I.e. it needs to be at least pure LGPL so it cannot be done with Qt.

But I don't see a fundamental reason why it shouldn't be possible.

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Re: io-slave design-problem
by Kevin Krammer on Thursday 12/Apr/2007, @05:30

> I'm pretty much sure all of the issues can be solved.

There has been at least one attempt for a unified VFS implementation (look for D-VFS in the archives of the xdg mailinglist on freedesktop.org).

However, main author/developer got lots of negative feedback from people not associated with any desktop project and gave up.

> it needs to be at least pure LGPL so it cannot be done with Qt

That's not an issue. Any such system would be out of process, i.e. a single daemon or multiple daemons (one for each connection like KIO slaves, or one for each protocol or one for each host, etc).

Since communication would happen through a specified protocol (also the way KIO slaves work), the licence of each side of the communication does not influence the licencing options of the other.

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Re: io-slave design-problem
by Martin Stubenschrott on Thursday 12/Apr/2007, @04:53

"less http://kdenews.org" IS possible (at least in my gentoo build with some lessopen-trickery).

But I think you're right, I would also prefer it to have things like that in an DE-independend way.

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Re: io-slave design-problem
by Diederik van der Boor on Thursday 12/Apr/2007, @05:04

<i>I guess that there is some good reason why this has never happened</i>

Yes, it needs kernel support from BSD, Solaris, HP-UX, Linux and Win32. That's a bit challenge to get right. So that's why the KIO slaves are still implemented at a higher level.

Perhaps some of the recent user-space filesystems (FUSE) open a new way to implement this.

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Re: io-slave design-problem
by Philipp on Thursday 12/Apr/2007, @05:54

>Yes, it needs kernel support from BSD, Solaris, HP-UX, Linux and Win32.
If this would really be the case, then KDE would not be at all possible on these platforms.
If you can do it within KDE, then you can do it seperately as well.

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Re: io-slave design-problem
by ac on Thursday 12/Apr/2007, @08:16

what?

its possible in kde on all platforms because kde is programmed to do it on all platforms. sure, you can do this with every application, but that means you need to change the code. thats the problem - you just can't change the code of all applications for half a dozen platforms...

so if you want something like kio that works with all applications, you need kernel support.

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Re: io-slave design-problem
by Philipp on Friday 13/Apr/2007, @00:07

Kernelsupport? Nonsense. This is mostly pure userspace.

For sure some support is in the kernel, as some basic network- and filesupport is there for other reasons, but why on earth needs a kernel knowledge about IMAP or EXIF?
The kernel doesn't need to know all these different things.

What you want is a functionality available on Linux platforms and this can be done with a library as well.
You are worried it cannot be used in the bash? For sure bash needs then to be adjusted as well.

Yes, we can't change the code of all applications on all platforms. But if you keep it in KDE alone and in Gnome alone and in other Apps, it for sure will never happen.

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Re: io-slave design-problem
by ac on Friday 13/Apr/2007, @13:33

you should read the whole of the thread...

just putting ioslaves into another library will not do anything. noone is going to rewrite their software just because some geeks like to really use networks and such.

the only way to make ioslaves fully work for non-kde software now (not in 10 years...) is to use kernel extensions. not because the kernel needs to know about imap or whatever, but because its the only common api for filesystems access every application uses. thats what fuse is about, to make things like that easier.

rewriting the ioslaves in pure c, with a minimum of depedencies - so that maybe someone else would use it, is not a good idea. the kde devs allready have enough work ahead. and you still won't get less-over-http anytime soon, because these apps arn't maintained anyway.

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Re: io-slave design-problem
by Evan "JabberWokky" E. on Tuesday 17/Apr/2007, @08:16

Since when has KDE limited itself to being only a Linux desktop?

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