On Sep 23, 2005, at 5:19 PM, Gerd Knops wrote:
On Fri, Sep 23, at 3:28 PM, Kevin Ballard wrote:
On Sep 23, 2005, at 4:11 PM, Gerd Knops wrote:
Erm, I'd like to point out that, as [5] mentions, in Tiger VFS's are now fairly well insulated from Kernel changes, and if I remember WWDC correctly, the Kernel changes in 10.4 should make things like VFS's a lot more forward-compatible. So it really isn't so much the moving target anymore.
True, and a kernel-level interface to something like Fuse would be the more efficient and elegant solution. Though considering their comments about stacking VFS plug-ins in that same document shows that they do tend to change their minds.
They've been pretty consistent on this, actually. Remember, that was over four years ago. Ever since, they've been warning developers that the VFS interface would change in the future. They inherited the VFS architecture from BSD, remember, they didn't create it. The stacking stuff came "for free". Tiger is the first time they've made a commitment to VFS binary compatibility.
Also binary compatibility for kexts between OS releases is very hard to maintain, and the fact remains that documentation is poor and kernel-level development is quite the black magic. NFS on the other hand is pretty well understood and they will think twice about dropping NFS support. But all this is philosophical until someone actually sits down and does something about this...