ANN: pythonfs - create linux filesystems in python

[Paul Boddie]

"Mike Rovner" <mike at nospam.com> wrote in message news:<mailman.2.1070995896.9307.python-list at python.org>...
> 
> It reminds me of Microsoft's promise to combine RDBMS and file system in a
> new Longhorn OS. Several years ago that idea was highly popular but nothing
> came out.

Longhorn isn't supposed to be out before 2006, unless you live in
Malaysia (apparently). Is this a message from the future? ;-)

Actually, I can imagine that it isn't quite equivalent to the
much-hyped Longhorn features and the GNOME Storage stuff, since a
filesystem typically provides a fairly rigid naming interface,
although I'd admit that the same kinds of naming issues superficially
exist with Web applications, and you can always disregard the
hierarchical "assumptions" there and interpret the query string in
your own way. One thing I dislike about various Web frameworks is that
they don't really let you disregard the directory-like nature of the
namespace, forcing you into mod_rewrite and other magic to "name
things your own way".

> That approach may be very interesting to allow user to use some plug-ins for
> the file system (access, security, notification, etc.).

What about doing the kinds of things that KDE's IOSlaves and GNOME's
VFS do, but at a lower layer in the system (and in a sane language, of
course)? Python lets you do HTTP, FTP and loads of other protocols
fairly trivially - imagine hooking that up to a filesystem interface.

Paul