Hi all, Particularly with the growing popularity of FUSE, i believe an interface to query meta-information from mounts would be quite useful. The interface could return information such as:
* File-system capabilities (network file-systems can't always be mapped into the POSIX layer perfectly) * Hints for desktop file-management, set as mount options (should .Trash be created or not; is it fast enough to do preview rendering; should backup-files be created locally rather than on the remote fs). Only the one who mounts, knows if he connects to the file-server in the next room, or to a remote and slow web-space. * Status of the filesystem (internal connection status, idle, busy, stalled,...) * Identify who's managing the mountpoint... (HAL, fuse,...) One possibility to reveal such information would be xattrs in the root of the filesystem (the mountpoint). But there might be other ways: A hidden file in the mountpoint, spec files under /etc (for FUSE mounts in $HOME), ioctls, dbus... "libmetastatfs" works like the statvfs function: You just throw a path in and it will return the information about the filesystem the path resides on. That way, the actual technique to query the attributes can be hidden. The format of the meta-information is key/value pairs, with string-keys and the values can be integers, booleans and strings... Here is a prototype of the library... metastatfs.h also has some #define's for standard attributes... http://www.scheinwelt.at/~norbertf/devel/libmetastatfs/files/ I wonder if there should be a kind of "offline" labeling of mount-points too (leaving a .mountpoint file to prevent file-managers from dropping stuff in; to display mount-point icons,...). Or having mount spec files - that's what i tried in libfusi. Norbert _______________________________________________ xdg mailing list [email protected] http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/xdg
