very simple datastore reimplementation

[david at lang.hm]

On Wed, 14 May 2008, Martin Langhoff wrote:

> On Wed, May 14, 2008 at 12:23 PM, Jim Gettys <jg at laptop.org> wrote:
>> > Can we shift the behaviour we want to put in the FUSE layer into a
>> > Sugar-level library that just uses POSIX underneath?
>
>>  That's what olpcfs is doing: it exploits the POSIX interface as much as
>>  possible, and if you read Scott's document (as I was today), you'll see
>>  that....
>
> Not sure if we are agreeing to the same thing ;-) I guess what I was
> meaning to say is "can we put the logic in a library _instead of_
> putting it in a FUSE layer?".

if we put everything into a library, then all tools that access the 
datastore need to use that library.

if we put that same functionality into FUSE then normal tools do not need 
to be modified at all to access the files.

while I can see the desire to not have to worry about having FUSE 
available to easily access the raw data, I think that it's far easier to 
do that then it is to modify every tool in the world to use the library to 
access the datastore instead.

either way you have scenerios where it's hard to access the data (after 
all, if you are running on an OS that doesn't support FUSE, what makes you 
think that it will have all your custom tools), but in one case you have 
to re-write every program that accesses files, in the other you can use 
standard utilities.

David Lang

> As I read the Olpcfs document (few weeks ago now), what I understood
> is that Olpcfs lays out a mostly POSIX-based convention, but uses a
> FUSE layer to store things.
>
> Did I completely misunderstand it?
>
> cheers,
>
>
>
> m
>