Quoth Bakul Shah <[email protected]>:
> On Feb 19, 2022, at 3:02 AM, sirjofri <[email protected]> wrote:
> > (4) A filesystem that filters a namespace, but the file contents and not
> > the namespace.
> >
> > The idea is to have a filesystem like exportfs, however, it doesn't just
> > represent the files as is, but applies user-defined filters to the
> > filenames/paths as well as the file contents.
> >
> > Imagine you have a namespace which contains markdown files that end with
> > .md. Using this overlay filesystem you can present the same namespace, but
> > convert the filenames using sed (from .md to .html) and when reading, the
> > file contents (from markdown syntax to html syntax).
> >
> > The filesystem would be very powerful for exposing plain text data as html,
> > encapsulating data into some predefined layout, and much more. It could
> > essentially make any plain text filesystem available as regular
> > web-friendly html files, convert troff source to postscript, convert plan 9
> > images to png, and much more. You can even present device files as json for
> > modern web applications.
>
> May be create a generic filter-fs that can be controlled with a script that
> can be updated via a control interface? Almost a mkfile like script so if a
> rule exists for .md -> .html, any listing will show foo.html instead of
> foo.md. Reading foo.html will transparently invoke a conversion program. You
> can get pretty clever and may be even install a src dir under /bin this way
> to build binaries on the fly! Or even just the presence of a mkfile in a
> filtered directory would be enough for this behavior. Taking this further, an
> installation of a new machine can be made instantaneous! Just use a local
> cache for all the binaries as they get built! Obviously this should be called
> mkfs :-)
>
See, for example, execfs, here:
http://felloff.net/usr/cinap_lenrek/
I use it for https://shithub.us, though it has
a number of limitations. Using it as a starting
point, but replacing regexes on the path with
a more powerful language, would probably get
quite close to what's described here.
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