On Wed, Dec 08, 1999 at 08:14:54AM +0100, Jan Jirmasek wrote:
> On Tue, 7 Dec 1999, David Bialac wrote:
>
> Hi David,
>
> > For fun (and because I think it might be a useful feature), I'm working
> > on a filesystem that allows a website to be mounted as a local
> > filesystem. I'm starting to dive in, and successfully have the kernel
> > recognizing that webfs exists, so it's now time to write some socket
> > code. Amongst the thing I want to put into this system is caching of
> > server data locally, specifically on the local filesystem. The
> > question I have is, can one filesystem ask to write to another? I
> > don't see anythinng in there that seems to attempt to do this, so I
> > need to be sure said is possible.
>
> there already exist quite a lot such projects right now. I have done one
> such experimental 'ftpfs', 'httpfs' filesystem by myself also. These kinds
> of filesystems are best examples of user-level filesystems, though.
> Some of the reasons:
One of the key factor to be able to use HTTP as a real filesystem
is to have support for the WebDAV extensions on the server [1]. This allow
to do proper resource discovery, atomic move and delete operations
as well as locking, i.e. key filesystem feature lacking with normal
HTTP-1.1 (while keeping the "good" feature of HTTP since this is designed
as a clean extension of the original protocol).
Coincidentally I discussed with Greg Stein [2] the developper of the WebDAV
module for apache yesterday, and WebDAV support will be added by default
to apache-2.0, at least this is planned. This will be in Windows 2000
too (and supported by Office 2000). Having a proper HTTP filesystem in
Linux would be a key point for penetration on medium sized shops
using Office on the client.
Daniel
[1] http://www.webdav.org/
[2] [EMAIL PROTECTED] , http://www.lyra.org/
--
[EMAIL PROTECTED] | W3C, INRIA Rhone-Alpes | Today's Bookmarks :
Tel : +33 476 615 257 | 655, avenue de l'Europe | Linux XML libxml WWW
Fax : +33 476 615 207 | 38330 Montbonnot FRANCE | Gnome rpm2html rpmfind
http://www.w3.org/People/all#veillard%40w3.org | RPM badminton Kaffe
