[summerofcode] FileSystemVirtualization - Ideas

Hi Narayan, 

On Sat, Jun 04, 2005 at 21:51 -0700, Narayan Newton wrote:
>  I am looking to apply for implementing the "FileSystemVirtualization" 
> project and would like some feedback on a couple ideas. I could see this 
> project working two ways. The first would be fairly simple. It would involve 
> creating a 'generic' class to represent a file system. For the sake of 
> argument, lets call it the FileSystem class. (I am known for my original 
> names) This class would have various methods defined that you need on a FS: 
> write, read, listdir, open..etc. Children of this class would implement 
> various types of file systems. For example, there could be a SvnFileSystem, 
> CvsFileSystem, MySQLFileSystem...etc. These would each implement the class 
> in whatever way they needed to make it work. This would allow programs to 
> use many different file systems easily.

I like this idea. 

> The other idea would be to build a full-scale vfs system. This would work in 
> much the same way, except there would be a "master" class and a defined uri 
> standard.

I wouldn't neccessarily mixin URI schemes into the vfs idea.
It seems more important to have clear and documented semantics
at API level and to make sure (by writing lots of tests) that
the semantics work reasonably well across fileystem
implementations.   

Adding an URL scheme on top of such an API and its
implementations shouldn't be hard, though.  Btw, I don't see a
connection to inheritance requirements there.  It's surely possible
to just have a dictionary of scheme->urlhandler mappings
without requiring the 'urlhandler' to even be a class. 

cheers, 

    holger