Hi all!

[For the impatient reader: Just some food for thought, no solution given].

The discussion about remote projects made me think that ideally Virtual File Systems (VFS) really do not belong into the editor, rather they should be part of the OS. An example is the OS X webdavfs [1], which allows to mount webdav servers with the Finder, or the (poorly working and read only) ftp file system [2]. Something like that for SFTP would be the ultimate solution.

Under linux there is an interesting project called Fuse [3], which basically hooks a generic driver into the kernels VFS and communicates with user-space file system 'modules' (the OS X webdavfs works somewhat similar). Someone else recently wrote a driver for FreeBSD [4] that allows to use the Fuse file system modules.

The problem is that the OS X VFS implementation seems to be rather under-documented and auite the moving target [5]. It changed a lot for Tiger. It has developed independent from FreeBSD, so porting the FreeBSD Fuse driver is not at all trivial (lack of documentation again not helping).

I briefly entertained a bridge that would make a remote sftp server appear like a webdav server, allowing it to be mounted locally using the webdavfs and without extra software on the server. While this is relatively easy to do (at least compared to the alternatives), it has one major back-draw: DAV [6] (complex [dare I say convoluted] as it seems) does not support the notion of file permissions. And the thought of making all files pushed to the server executable (or not executable) is not very appealing.

The ftpfs [2] on OS X uses yet another approach: It presents itself to the OS as an NFS server, and translates NFS to FTP. This may seem like a convoluted approach (and it is), but has the advantage that it can be completely implemented in user space, and the NFS protocol encapsulates it from changes in the kernels VFS implementation. So one could write a bridge/gateway program that serves NFS and translates it to SFTP. Or (though I have not had a look at feasibility) it might even be possible to make this Fuse compatible, giving easy access to many of the file system modules available for Fuse ([7], or makings of a RailsFS [8]). Sometimes I wish I wouldn't have to work for food...

Gerd

[1] man mount_webdav [2] man mount_ftp [3] http://fuse.sourceforge.net/ [4] http://wikitest.freebsd.org/moin.cgi/FuseFilesystem [5] http://developer.apple.com/qa/qa2001/qa1242.html [6] http://www.webdav.org/ [7] http://fuse.sourceforge.net/filesystems.html [8] http://redhanded.hobix.com/inspect/ railsfsAfterACoupleMinutesOfToolingWithFuseWhoa.html