early-gdm redux ( I am sorry my way is better faster... for a desktop )

[Jon Nettleton]

On 9/14/07, Colin Walters <walters at redhat.com> wrote:
> On 9/13/07, Jon Nettleton <jon.nettleton at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > That might work for a single user, but what about a family of users
> > that want to share photos?  If anything I would suggest a webdav
> > enabled svn repo than rsync+cron.  Drag and drop data, instant
> > revision control.  With some ldap and apache magic you can get user
> > privileges refined as well.
> >
>
> Right - which gets to my point which is that in very few situations do
> you actually  want a remote filesystem.  For backing up photos, you
> actually don't want to support permanent delete for example, or at
> least it should be very hard to do.  Your svn repository would be like
> that.
>
> But to go back to why I think autofs/iscsi and other kernel-mounted
> filesystems are a bad idea for the desktop is because you need to
> design for the laptop case, and my experience with all kernel-mounted
> filesystems and laptops has been uninterruptible processes hung on IO
> after you disconnect from the network.  By putting things in user
> space you avoid this insanity, and it's a heck of a lot simpler.
>
> I'm sure there are situations in which kernel-mounted NFS is
> appropriate, but it's one of those technologies I go out of my way to
> avoid because there is almost always a better way.
>

a lot of this will also be alleviated once we get a proper location
manager.  I have a semi-working one right now based on an overlay fs
on top of /etc.  Each location is a different subversion branch and
only changed files get stored in the overlay.  It also exposes the
location through dbus for a user-space app.  It is a long way from
reliable and finished but I am happy with the design so far.

Jon