Gnome virtual filesystem support in applications…
So, NFS and laptops (that change networks) do not love each other at all. I always forget to unmount, or the connection dies before I remember etc.. and it doesnt work over the internet in a sane way (I dont run a VPN at home)
So, I started using sftp “mounts” with Nautilus. But there is a problem. Can we puh-leeeze make gnome-vfs mandatory for all applications? It makes sftp:// support pretty useless when pretty much nothing can use the files I can view on my filemanager.. Is there a reason why it needs to be something application writers should decide? (”I never use gnome-vfs myself, so my users probably wont either..” - wrong.)
It’s just awesome that I could access my own fileserver with the file manager (seeing thumbnails etc) while on Guadec. What sucks, is that most of the time I had to copy the files locally first, to be able to use them.
It seems wrong to me that this is an application-level decision. VFS is a very important part of the Free Desktop platform these days, and it is awesome in our increasingly networked world. Is it hard to add vfs support as part of the core libraries?
Edit: actually, this thing should be a free desktop wide thing, not just for Gnome. What sucks, is that for example, if I browse sftp with Nautilus, and drag a file to K3B, the KDE CD burning tool, it needs to initiate the KDE VFS method for the same file to access it. This sucks. I so much wish to have a solution that works with all free software applications.
June 2nd, 2005 at 18:22
I agree entirely. It’s exceedingly frustrating.
This sort of thing needs to Just Work(tm).
June 2nd, 2005 at 18:34
I also agree. However, why can’t the VFS layer be moved even *further* down so I can use it from my shell?
June 2nd, 2005 at 18:39
Hear, hear!
SFTP should be mountable just like NFS or SMB. None of this application-level GNOME-only stuff.
June 2nd, 2005 at 18:50
I’m pretty naive here, but I’m not sure SFTP supports all the premitives you’d need to do true remote editing. Wouldn’t VFS still need to move the file to a local to a tmp location on open and push it back on saves?
June 2nd, 2005 at 18:52
It’s sad to say but IMHO, KDE does it the right way. It uses local temp files to manage that. So why Gnome can’t do that?
June 2nd, 2005 at 20:35
With Linux, one can use FUSE (Filesystem in userspace) which can mount any gnome-vfs-accessible URL like any other filesystem. But that’s Linux-only solution.
Gnome-vfs must remain crossplatform. It can’t depend on Linux kernel features.
June 2nd, 2005 at 20:59
Check the D-VFS threads on XDG@freedesktop
June 2nd, 2005 at 21:22
Indeed, D-VFS would be the only way you’d get this to be cross-desktop *and* cross-platform.
Sadly, with school, I don’t even have time to read mailing lists anymore, much less actually bring D-VFS to fruition. I’m secretly (well, not so secretly now, I guess) hoping that some KIOSlaves and gnome-vfs developers will get together and carry things through to completion.
June 2nd, 2005 at 21:53
Someone beat me to it, wiht the XDG thread
I’d love vim to be one of the first apps to be gnome-vfs’d up in the mean time. However, as Lewis has said, this sort-of stuff should *not* be X specific! I want this on the shell too!
June 2nd, 2005 at 22:45
Yes, it sucks. And it blows. And.. whatever.
The Problem is, that gnome-vfs is a problem itself. It’s to complicated, to overblown. Instead of serving as a simplification layer (easy the pain of connecting to different abstract file systems) it creates a whole bunch of problems.
Hopefully that will change! The gnome-vfs maintainers promised to create a new, document oriented API (load file, save file, move file, all those convenient functions). But when…?
So forcing people to adopt gnome-vfs is the wrong way, though I see your point. It’s a bitch.
June 2nd, 2005 at 23:10
As someone else mentioned, there’s several ways to do it on Linux - that I know of, there’s lufs , fuse-sshfs , and the shfs kernel module. I’m currently using fuse-sshfs. Install fuse and fuse-sshfs, then it’s as simple as:
modprobe fuse
sshfs hostname:/directory /path/to/mountpoint
lufs is about the same but seems to be a little slower and buggier, shfs needs to be suid to be really usable so I don’t like that.
June 2nd, 2005 at 23:16
Of course, shfs is just SSH, so can’t be compared to gnome-vfs (even though it rocks). Fuse however looks very cool.
June 3rd, 2005 at 08:35
Well, what is “mounting” anyway but something UNIX has for disks? Why do you want to “mount” stuff like that? Stuff should just “work”. Both the KDE and Gnome VFS stuff enables the user to use stuff on remote servers without the whole desktop hanging when the network goes down (I’m sure you know what I mean if you have used NFS on a laptop) - but it’s pointless to say the “[insert your favorite desktop here] one is better because…” since the whole point is that you want something that works for all end user applications. I dont care so much for the terminal, because I can just SSH in to the remote machine and edit the files locally, but what would be nice is to have a solution that at least worked for “freedesktop applications” (meaning the “desktop applications” of today)
Also, I dont know if the gnome-vfs stuff uses tempfiles, or modifies the stuff remotely, what I care is whether it works or not. And how fast it is. How it is done technically is less important than the user experience.
“Mounting” stuff tends to break when you switch IP-addresses and networks, if it worked OK, I would just have used NFS all the time.
Adam: having to issue a “mount” command from the shell defeats the whole point of “easy” really. It is only easy because you are familiar with the concept of unix mounting filesystems, or that someone has edited your fstab for you. That stuff is nice for things you use frequently (you can always make it user-mountable) - but what happens if you kill the network? Didnt you just re-invent NFS?
Strass: what do “local temp files” really have to do with the issue here?
June 3rd, 2005 at 12:43
In the meanwhile, it would be very nice to have apps distinguish remote resources mounted as local directories. Whoever else experienced the pain of browsing an sshfs mounted directory full of images with Nautilus will understand the need for such a distinction (even based on heuristics) to be made.
It could be done by checking /etc/mtab and simply disabling the View Thumbnails option for such directories.
July 15th, 2005 at 02:14
why ca we not just mount the gnome-vfs things into the normal file-system. But, why is there gnome-vfs then.
hmm, shouldnt the kernel have a function like a “fluffy”-mountoption - so anyone can mount things where there’s a good chance that it could disappear at any time. Strategy could be to handel a security cache for the files and a very straight write-through.
July 28th, 2005 at 06:55
I’m using FUSE and sshfs and they work great (but as others noted, Linux only). However, the problem is the reverse of gnome-vfs: all my apps *except* Nautilus work fine. Nautilus can see the files, but since it sees that they are not owned by the user who is browsing it (they have the UID and GID of the user on the remote host), it refuses to let the user change them. I was looking for a solution to this when I came across this blog entry.
July 29th, 2005 at 12:47
Cliff: what happens if you change your ip and try to access the ssh filesystem?
August 3rd, 2005 at 12:55
Tuomas,
Ironically, Comcast had a small outage tonight and I temporarily lost Internet for a short while. I had several sshfs filesystems mounted (and was in fact accessing one of them when this occurred. The whole system pretty much came to a standstill, much as if I had really lost a disk (I’ve seen similar effects when an IDE drive failed on me).
I didn’t get a chance to see what would have happened had I waited because I ended up rebooting.
I’m wondering how difficult it would have been for FUSE/sshfs to have broken out of this and returned an error rather than just hanging waiting for I/O to complete.
August 8th, 2005 at 17:04
Yeah, you discovered exactly what I am talking about..
I am working from our aviation club room now, and well.. guess if I forgot to unmount the NFS shares again.. Sigh.. With windows the reboots would be so frequent anyway, that I wouldnt notice, but blah..
On the upside, I got gnome-vfs to work with the Gimp, so I can save and load remotely from my fileserver at home
//t
August 14th, 2005 at 11:48
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February 15th, 2006 at 11:30
I recently started using sshfs with fuse to overcome this problem. With a bit of tweaking, it’s superb. Totally stable. I now have total access to several boxes via nautilus or any local program. Brilliant stuff!
If you do decide to try it out, make sure you get the most recent version from the site, the most current version from the fedora repo was too buggy to use. Other than that, very good. Make sure you avoid shfs though (note only one s) as I’ve found this to be very unstable (crashes a lot on unmounting).
March 27th, 2007 at 17:24
sshfs is no long linux specific. It has been ported to Mac OSX and FreeBSD.
All this gnome-vfs should be removed and replaced with FUSE IMO