Live data from Hacker News

Dokany – User mode file system library for windows with FUSE Wrapper

github.com

31–40 of 51 posts

Re: Dokany – User mode file system library for windows with FUSE Wrapper

#32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not about creating new filesystems, but using filesystem ui to browse any filesystem like hierarchy. For example using a potential implementation you as a user could be browsing S3, remote NFS, or gmail account where labels would be represented as folders and emails as text files.

> gmail account where labels would be represented as folders and emails as text files. Okay, this sounds incredible - is this an actual doable thing here?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GmailFS.

Re: Dokany – User mode file system library for windows with FUSE Wrapper

#34
post #11
post #8

Why and when I need create a new file system on Windows other than FAT or NTFS? This problem seems interesting.

You don't. Where this comes in as useful is when you have a dual boot system, and you want to access your ext3 filesystems from Windows, for example. It would also be useful for running FUSE ZFS, since ZFS can protect data in ways which are science fiction for NTFS.

Or BTRFS or EXT4 or XFS or etc...

On any case NTFS feels a lot outdate against any other FS, plus It helps a lot to the people (like me) that works half time on Linux, half time on Windows. Instead of keep the shared data on NTFS, I could dream of using BTRFs and keep a time machine like system using snapshots....

Re: Dokany – User mode file system library for windows with FUSE Wrapper

#36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not about creating new filesystems, but using filesystem ui to browse any filesystem like hierarchy. For example using a potential implementation you as a user could be browsing S3, remote NFS, or gmail account where labels would be represented as folders and emails as text files.

> gmail account where labels would be represented as folders and emails as text files. Okay, this sounds incredible - is this an actual doable thing here?

This was a big deal when gmail was first announced and they said they would give away one gigabyte (!!) worth of email storage with every (free!) account.

These days, dropbox, drive and many other similar services provide a much more straightforward mapping to a storage service.

Re: Dokany – User mode file system library for windows with FUSE Wrapper

#37

The design of this library reminds me of OOP anti-pattern "Public Morozov" (in the name of popular Soviet myth about 13-year old boy Pavlik Morozov, who denounced his father to authorities), which exposes internal state of an object and private methods via public delegates.

When I tried Dokany, I was pretty happy with the API. (C# Adapter) There were some non-obvious tricks, but overall, compared to ELDOS, the API is well thought out.

Re: Dokany – User mode file system library for windows with FUSE Wrapper

#38
post #8

Why and when I need create a new file system on Windows other than FAT or NTFS? This problem seems interesting.

You don't. Dokany allows a user-mode application to expose its own virtual drive.

Examples of possible use cases:

- Mount a zip file as a drive letter

- Mount an ftp site as a drive letter

- Mount an Android device as a drive letter

In all the above cases, there's ways to view zip files, ftp sites, and Android devices in Explorer; but you can not open these files in any application you want unless they are copied to a local disk.

Re: Dokany – User mode file system library for windows with FUSE Wrapper

#39

This is a fantastic project. FWIW, Paragon's extfs for Windows uses either Dokany or the original Dokan, so at least one company thought this was good enough to use in production. I'll just point out for anyone interested in trying this, expect BSODs: https://github.com/dokan-dev/dokany/issues/344 . I'm also not sure how the Win10 Anniversary driver signing changes have affected the project - they're relying on a com…

Why would a user-space file system driver cause BSOD?
Post reply on HN