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The File Filesystem (2021)

mgree.github.io

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Re: The File Filesystem (2021)

#21
Useful enough that it should be an OS-level standard feature, imho.

Unix-like OSes allow mounting disk images to explore their contents. But there's many more file formats where exploring files-inside-files is useful. Compressed archives, for one. Some file managers support those, but (imho) application-level is not the optimal layer to put this functionality.

Could be implemented with a kind of driver-per-filetype.

Re: The File Filesystem (2021)

#23
post #15

For fuck's sake! Not everything needs to be a file! (This is a joke. I love the idea and execution.)

Daniel Stenberg, of cURL fame, co-write an Amiga-editor called FrexxEd where the open buffers were exposed as files in the filesystem. Meaning you could write any shell script to manipulate an open buffer (not that important as it also exposed all editor functionality both via IPC via Arexx and via FPL - a C-like scripting language), and that you could e.g. compile without saving ( that was very helpful on a system w…

Classic MacOS in the 80s had "MPW" macintosh programmers workshop - that treated open text windows as files and selections within the windows as files, so it wasn't uncommon to have a portion of an otherwise documentation file have a "click here and hit enter", which would use the selected text as stdin for some semi-ported unix tool. (no memory protection or multitasking, so true pipelines with backpressure didn't work)

Re: The File Filesystem (2021)

#24

Useful enough that it should be an OS-level standard feature, imho. Unix-like OSes allow mounting disk images to explore their contents. But there's many more file formats where exploring files-inside-files is useful. Compressed archives, for one. Some file managers support those, but (imho) application-level is not the optimal layer to put this functionality. Could be implemented with a kind of driver-per-filetype.

Honest question: How is this useful? I don’t see any use-case where this would come in handy.

Re: The File Filesystem (2021)

#25

Useful enough that it should be an OS-level standard feature, imho. Unix-like OSes allow mounting disk images to explore their contents. But there's many more file formats where exploring files-inside-files is useful. Compressed archives, for one. Some file managers support those, but (imho) application-level is not the optimal layer to put this functionality. Could be implemented with a kind of driver-per-filetype.

It exists :-)

For zip archives, there are fuse-zip and mount-zip which are FUSE filesystem.

As an intermediate between OS level and application-level, there are desktop environment level: gvfs for GNOME and KIO for KDE, but they are compatible only in their own ecosystems.

Re: The File Filesystem (2021)

#26

Useful enough that it should be an OS-level standard feature, imho. Unix-like OSes allow mounting disk images to explore their contents. But there's many more file formats where exploring files-inside-files is useful. Compressed archives, for one. Some file managers support those, but (imho) application-level is not the optimal layer to put this functionality. Could be implemented with a kind of driver-per-filetype.

Really what you'd like to see is a way to write the mount command for each file type (do one thing well) and another command to detect the file type and dispatch accordingly (probably similar to the `file` command), all in user space.

The only thing standing in the way of this today is that MacOS doesn't expose a user space file system API. You can do this on Linux, Windows, and BSDs today.

(No, file provider extensions don't cut it, Apple devs who read this, please give us a FUSE equivalent, we know it exists).

Re: The File Filesystem (2021)

#27
post #24

Useful enough that it should be an OS-level standard feature, imho. Unix-like OSes allow mounting disk images to explore their contents. But there's many more file formats where exploring files-inside-files is useful. Compressed archives, for one. Some file managers support those, but (imho) application-level is not the optimal layer to put this functionality. Could be implemented with a kind of driver-per-filetype.

Honest question: How is this useful? I don’t see any use-case where this would come in handy.

You could seed compressed archives of massive text files or similar via BitTorrent while making the contents available to your apps in read-only mode.

Re: The File Filesystem (2021)

#28
This is really neat, but when I saw the headline I got excited that it was something I have been looking for / considering writing, and I figure the comments here would be a good place to ask if something like this exists:

Is there a FUSE filesystem that runs in-memory (like tmpfs) while mounted, and then when dismounted it serializes to a single file on disk? The closest I can find are FUSE drivers that mount archive files, but then you don't get things like symlinks.

Re: The File Filesystem (2021)

#29
post #26

Useful enough that it should be an OS-level standard feature, imho. Unix-like OSes allow mounting disk images to explore their contents. But there's many more file formats where exploring files-inside-files is useful. Compressed archives, for one. Some file managers support those, but (imho) application-level is not the optimal layer to put this functionality. Could be implemented with a kind of driver-per-filetype.

Really what you'd like to see is a way to write the mount command for each file type (do one thing well) and another command to detect the file type and dispatch accordingly (probably similar to the `file` command), all in user space. The only thing standing in the way of this today is that MacOS doesn't expose a user space file system API. You can do this on Linux, Windows, and BSDs today. (No, file provider extensi…

Does https://osxfuse.github.io/ cover this? Or is there some fundamental issue? (beyond "it's not built in")

Re: The File Filesystem (2021)

#30
post #28

This is really neat, but when I saw the headline I got excited that it was something I have been looking for / considering writing, and I figure the comments here would be a good place to ask if something like this exists: Is there a FUSE filesystem that runs in-memory (like tmpfs) while mounted, and then when dismounted it serializes to a single file on disk? The closest I can find are FUSE drivers that mount archiv…

does it have to be fuse? cant you mount a disk image with loopback
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