Re: Niche for Hurd - discussion - the power of translators

[olafBuddenhagen]

Hi,

On Thu, Nov 13, 2008 at 11:50:42PM +0100, Thomas Schwinge wrote:

> But as soon as it's no longer in the CWD, wouldn't it be better to
> leave out the colon and use `/ftp'?

What Samuel said.

> Some sort of killer feature for demonstrating it (even though not
> really visible) was if apt-get used such `/ftp/WHEREVER/WHATEVER'
> paths to download its files, instead of its current ftp-retrieval
> mechanism (whatever that is).

Factoring out URL handlers into translators is actually one of the
obvious pieces in my application restructuring plans -- these
translators would be used by netrik of course, but also by any other
application using standard network protocols.

However, the current ftpfs is not suitable for such interactive use I
think: AFAIK It lacks interfaces for progress tracking, error handling
etc.

> Oh.  I just see that apt-get uses HTTP URLs in
> `/etc/apt/sources.list'.  But perhaps it can do FTP as well?

Yes, both are fine. Most mirrors actually offer both, so you can just
exchange ftp: for http: and vice versa.

> For httpfs (in case it's in a working state at all) it'd need some
> (minor) packaging effort.

Well, every time I raised the question of packaging hurdextras
translators, the discussion ended at the question whether to put them
all in one package, or each translator in its own...

(For the record: IMHO one package is fine. If one of the translators
suddenly starts undergoing frequent updates, it can still be split
out...)

-antrik-