- From: Al Gilman <asgilman@iamdigex.net>
- Date: Fri, 16 Aug 2002 15:31:54 -0400
- To: ettore@ximian.com
- Cc: uri@w3.org, Norman Walsh <Norman.Walsh@Sun.COM>, JP Schnapper-Casteras <jp_sc@yahoo.com>
At 12:56 PM 2002-08-16, Dan Connolly wrote: >Hi, > >The gnome VFS stuff looks nifty; but the use >of '#' to compose functions with URIs looks >backwards to me... > >[[ > Unlike normal Internet URIs, though, GNOME VFS allows stacking of >access methods. For example, assume you want to read a file which is >stored in a .tar file. In that case, you want to be able to open the >parent .tar file, extract the file you want, and read it. In practice, >you need a tar file access method that is able to extract a file from a >.tar file, and you also need an access method to access the .tar file >itself. > >This means that you want to stack the tar access method "on top" of >another generic access method to read the .tar file itself. I would have thought that a _virtual_ file system would hide the unTar application. And that the VFS implementation of a file: URL would be ambiguous as to where the unTar took place anyway. The file path would drill right through the level at which the directory was encoded for archiving without noticing, and the remote archive server would either unTar to return the level addressed in the file: URI or return a tuple of a tar archive of a directory corresponding to an initial substring of the file: path and the residual path that still had to be traversed after the recipient unTarred the archive. Check out the various threads of work visible in the remote file access activity in the Global Grid Forum, Closest to Gnome is probably the work of Micah Beck at Tennessee. Micah Beck http://www.cs.utk.edu/~mbeck/ Global Grid Forum Remote Data Access Working Group http://www.zib.de/ggf/data/ Al
Received on Friday, 16 August 2002 15:32:29 UTC