[ANN] FuseFS-0.3

ruby-talk
1

I've been discussing with Greg ways to make FuseFS cross-platform (I've been posting as greasygreasy on Redhanded, BTW).

I think I have a pretty good solution I've worked up using a modified version of Tatsuki Sugiura’s WebDAV Servlet for WEBRick (http://redhanded.hobix.com/inspect/webrickWebdavHandlerSafelyExtractedFromTheWild.html). Reading works perfectly, writing is good on Windows but I need to implement locking in Sugiura's code before OS X (and maybe linux?) will allow writing.

On OS X WebDAV support is always available and acts just like a normal mounted filesystem. I believe that on Linux one can use WebDAV using davfs (http://dav.sourceforge.net/), which seems to come with quite a few distros. Windows has built-in support for WebDAV as well, but I've just discovered that it only seems to allow dragging files in and out of folders, not editing-in-place or from the command line. Do those with more Windows experience know, is there any way to have a more natural WebDAV mount on Windows like on the other OS's? Or am I barking up the wrong tree with this solution? What would you folks use instead? CIFS or SMB has been suggested to me, and my original idea was an NFS server, both well supported cross-platform, but I know of no ruby library for writing either.

-- Brian Palmer

2

If I remember correctly, WEBDav support is built into windows now ...

I haven't tested it, but I believe that you get all of the webdav
functionality for windows through explorer, not a command prompt ...

But, that's better than nothing... I'll have to do a bit of research.

j.

···

On 9/21/05, Brian Palmer <ruby@brian.pocketmartiansoftware.com> wrote:

I've been discussing with Greg ways to make FuseFS cross-platform
(I've been posting as greasygreasy on Redhanded, BTW).

I think I have a pretty good solution I've worked up using a modified
version of Tatsuki Sugiura's WebDAV Servlet for WEBRick (http://
redhanded.hobix.com/inspect/
webrickWebdavHandlerSafelyExtractedFromTheWild.html). Reading works
perfectly, writing is good on Windows but I need to implement locking
in Sugiura's code before OS X (and maybe linux?) will allow writing.

On OS X WebDAV support is always available and acts just like a
normal mounted filesystem. I believe that on Linux one can use
WebDAV using davfs (http://dav.sourceforge.net/\), which seems to come
with quite a few distros. Windows has built-in support for WebDAV as
well, but I've just discovered that it only seems to allow dragging
files in and out of folders, not editing-in-place or from the command
line. Do those with more Windows experience know, is there any way
to have a more natural WebDAV mount on Windows like on the other
OS's? Or am I barking up the wrong tree with this solution? What
would you folks use instead? CIFS or SMB has been suggested to me,
and my original idea was an NFS server, both well supported cross-
platform, but I know of no ruby library for writing either.

-- Brian Palmer

--
"http://ruby-lang.org -- do you ruby?"

Jeff Wood

3

I've been discussing with Greg ways to make FuseFS cross-platform
(I've been posting as greasygreasy on Redhanded, BTW).

I think I have a pretty good solution I've worked up using a modified
version of Tatsuki Sugiura's WebDAV Servlet for WEBRick (http://
redhanded.hobix.com/inspect/
webrickWebdavHandlerSafelyExtractedFromTheWild.html). Reading works
perfectly, writing is good on Windows but I need to implement locking
in Sugiura's code before OS X (and maybe linux?) will allow writing.

On OS X WebDAV support is always available and acts just like a
normal mounted filesystem. I believe that on Linux one can use
WebDAV using davfs (http://dav.sourceforge.net/\), which seems to come
with quite a few distros. Windows has built-in support for WebDAV as
well, but I've just discovered that it only seems to allow dragging
files in and out of folders, not editing-in-place or from the command
line. Do those with more Windows experience know, is there any way
to have a more natural WebDAV mount on Windows like on the other
OS's? Or am I barking up the wrong tree with this solution?

DAV is a good idea, but 'open as web folder' is an awful webdav
implementation. It's given me grey hair over the past year.

Essentially, it doesn't mount a DAV share as a drive at all, explorer
just pretends it does. This is why you get in-place editing issues,
and the command line is out.

This is also why things like Word have to ask you for your
username/password when you try to save .docs to a webdav 'share'. A
decent webdav client for windows is long overdue, don't know of any
free ones unfortunately.

Don't get me wrong - It's usable, and can be made fairly sane with a
few apache patches, but not an ideal solution if you want to support
the windows crowd.

To be fair, Panther was actually pretty rubbish if you were using it
for anything important, but Tiger is a really solid implementation
(support https too).

···

On 22/09/05, Brian Palmer <ruby@brian.pocketmartiansoftware.com> wrote:

What
would you folks use instead? CIFS or SMB has been suggested to me,
and my original idea was an NFS server, both well supported cross-
platform, but I know of no ruby library for writing either.

-- Brian Palmer

--
Rasputin :: Jack of All Trades - Master of Nuns

4

Brian Palmer wrote:

Windows has built-in support for WebDAV as well, but I've just discovered that it only seems to allow dragging files in and out of folders, not editing-in-place or from the command line.

Stepping back a bit, doesn't Windows allow mounting of virtual drives? Like those programs where you can mount an ISO as a drive. Couldn't FuseFS just leverage that API directly rather than going through layers and layers of other APIs?

_why

5

Natively, Windows doesn't even support mounting of ISOs. But there are plenty of programs around that will allow you to do so, Alcohol, Daemon Tools, etc. Basically they are a filesystem driver, just like FUSE is in Linux. So it could be done this way if somebody wrote a Windows VFS driver that allowed all the functionality that FUSE does, probably through a DLL that your program could like in.

-- Brian

···

On Sep 22, 2005, at 10:38 AM, why the lucky stiff wrote:

Brian Palmer wrote:

Windows has built-in support for WebDAV as well, but I've just discovered that it only seems to allow dragging files in and out of folders, not editing-in-place or from the command line.

Stepping back a bit, doesn't Windows allow mounting of virtual drives? Like those programs where you can mount an ISO as a drive. Couldn't FuseFS just leverage that API directly rather than going through layers and layers of other APIs?

_why