Hi

On Tue, Jun 21, 2011 at 12:37 PM, Benjamin Fleischer <[email protected]>wrote:
>
>
> Fuse4X is owned and maintained by Anatol. Like MacFUSE it has just a single
> owner. Though Anatol's project is based on MacFUSE he changed quite a lot.
> The result is a MacFUSE successor which is binary incompatible with most
> existing MacFUSE filesystems. The filesystems would need to be specifically
> recompiled against Fuse4X for things to work. How likely is that?
>

The thing is that you cannot rebrand the project without braking backward
compatibility. MacFUSE applications are linked against MacFUSE.framework. If
you decide to keep /Library/Frameworks/MacFUSE.framework/ then you have a
conflict of interests with Google. Let me quote Amit from his post
http://tinyurl.com/447efe4

"Among other things related to the history of the project, there's strong
branding/affiliation/association of "MacFUSE" with "Google"."

If you still want to keep MacFUSE framework you will have legal issues with
Google then.


> Keep in mind that Fuse4X is only compatible with Mac OS X 10.6. For open
> source projects this would be an easy task but for commercial or in general
> closed source projects this won't be as easy. That's why there could not
> have been extensive testing regarding compatibility of his MacFUSE fork with
> existing filesystems. From a developer's point of view this and dropping
> support for 10.5 is bad.
>

I did not test Fuse4X with 10.5 I suspect just recompiling it with 10.5
should work. If you think that 10.5 support is important for you - send me
the patch. I'll be happy to include it.


>
> Don't get me wrong, Anatol has some great ideas and I agree with him that
> it is important to bring MacFUSE (or whatever it is called) up to speed and
> restore compatibility with its Linux origin. But we should not rush things.
> In my opinion it is important to first release a stable and well-tested
> version of MacFUSE/OSXFUSE that does not change too much code-wise, is
> binary compatible with MacFUSE and supports Snow Leopard's 64 bit kernel.
> This way there is no need to recompile existing filesystems. The transition
> from MacFUSE to its successor will be a lot smoother this way. The second
> release should fully support Lion. This would be a basis we could build on
> and adopt some more extensive code changes.
>

Having several open-source forks (10.5-compatible vs upstream-compatible)
would be really confusing. I would really love to see only one fork. It is
easier to add 10.5 support to Fuse4X instead of forking project again.

Take into account that there is NuFS - another, commercial successor of
MacFUSE and add here Apple insiders rumors about "something interesting in
Lion" (my guess is Fuse-like macosx-specific framework). This is just too
many MacFUSE successors - this is going to be very confusing both for users
and developers.


>
> Code-wise Anatol's fork is based on Erik's kernel code to support 64 bit
> kernels and my port of Linux FUSE 2.8.5 to Mac OS X. On top of that he
> applied his own patches.
>

Fuse 2.8.5 is not totally supported yet. The Fuse API is updated, but
FUSE_IOCTL and FUSE_POLL requests are not implemented in kext yet. I am
going to look at it in the next few weeks.

Erik and I are the "owners" of the OSXFUSE project. Once we get some things
> worked out I'm all for adding contributors. I would like OSXFUSE to be
> community based to prevent the situation we now have with MacFUSE and Amit
> abandoning the project.
>

As I said many times already I am all open for Fuse4X contributors and
developers. Benjamin, if you are willing to contribute to Fuse4X I'll grant
you developer permissions.

-- 
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups 
"MacFUSE" group.
To post to this group, send email to [email protected].
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to 
[email protected].
For more options, visit this group at 
http://groups.google.com/group/macfuse?hl=en.

Reply via email to