[gollem] Re: Homedir and rootdir parameters (Patch)

[Jeroen Huinink]

"Chuck Hagenbuch" <chuck at horde.org> wrote:
> Quoting j.huinink at wanadoo.nl:
>
> > The attached patch implements home and root parameters in the Gollem.
> > This is in addition to the home and vfsroot in the VFS drivers and it
> > should work for all backends. From discussion on this and the dev list I
> > am under the impression that this will not be solved in a generic
fashion
> > for the VFS drivers themselves so I would like to have these parameters
as
> > gollem parameters.
>
> This seems awfully duplicative and messy to me. I'd like to solve it in a
> portable way for all VFS drivers whenever that makes sense. But some
drivers
> just won't support these - FTP, for instance - and I don't think they
should.

I don't see why FTP wouldn't support this. FTP puts you in a directory which
can be configured on the FTP server. It depends on the server
implementation, the configuration options available and the actual settings
of the FTP server. This default directory is the [Home] directory in the
current implementation. I don't see why this has to be that way. You could
define a home directory and initially do a ChangeDirectory to that
directory. Also the concept of a root can be enforced the way I do when you
use FTP. I tested it with FTP and it worked and I don't see how that would
give conceptual problems.

The reason why I implemented it in Gollem was that this works with the
current implementations of the VFS drivers. As I see/saw it Gollem is an
additional layer over the VFS drivers. I think somebody spoke about gollem
backend parameters and vfs backend parameters as being seperate. I thought
that if we couldn't iron out the differences in the VFS layer we might as
well try to do it in the layer on top of VFS, ie Gollem. I was afraid to
touch the VFS drivers since I'm not sure where they are used elsewhere and
what I would break. This change gives me the functionality that I want where
I want it.

The one thing that I was uncomfortable with was that I was enforcing part of
the security at the frontend, instead of the backend where it should be.

I have no problem with taking on the VFS driver implementations and
implement this functionality there.

I know the question has been asked before and I get the feeling that you
must be terribly busy with all the good work that you do. But some design
documentation or directional statement where you want to take certain
developments would help guys like me. I want to pitch in some work when I
have some time left to give something back to the Horde community. I try to
keep up with the various mailing lists and search through the archives
before I try to do something, but a lot of the ideas that must live within
the core team are not on the list or in any documentation.

Regards,
Jeroen