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[[meta title="Have Debian's apt use ftpfs"]]

\#hurd [[IRC]] channel, 2009-03-13.

    <tschwinge> By the way: I had another GSoC idea:
    <tschwinge> (a) make ftpfs / httpfs unsable enough for...
    <tschwinge> (b) have Debian's apt / whetever not use a direct ftp / http
      connection, but instead use /ftp/ftp.debian.org/whatever etc.
    <tschwinge> (c) Make unionfs unsable enough, so that it can be used
      together with nfs (or whatever) to sarve as a cache for /ftp/.
    <antrik> uhm... you mean all of this as a single GSoC project?
    <antrik> indeed I have the intention of turning ftpfs/httpfs into something
      that can be used by other tools instead of a library
    <antrik> but that requires them to grow completely new interfaces, making
      them suitable for interactive use
    <antrik> you are right though that this would be a nice GSoC project... no
      idea why I never thought of it in this context
    <tschwinge> I think I proposed this idea already some months ago on some
      mailing list.
    <tschwinge> I don't think it's too much work.
    <tschwinge> Or why do you think?
    <antrik> it is considerable work
    <antrik> it requires implementing a non-trivial, directory based FS
      interface
    <tschwinge> (c), OK, but why (a) and (b)?
    <antrik> also, I'd probably reimplement them on top of libcurl... no need
      to maintain our own wheels :-)
    <tschwinge> That for sure, yes.  But for starterst, we can just take ftpfs
      as it is.
    <antrik> I think I explained the issues in some past discussion, though I
      don't remember where it was
    <tschwinge> And just teach apt to open /ftp/... instead of calling whatever
      function to retrieve a ftp file.
    <antrik> you want progress tracking for one
    <antrik> you want the client to see redirects
    <antrik> (OK, that might not be necessary for apt-get... it would be
      necessary for other use cases like a web browser, though)
    <antrik> you want proper error handlin
    <tschwinge> http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.os.hurd.bugs/16575/focus=16795
    <antrik> none of this can be expressed by opening a single virtual file
    <antrik> it would require adding a completely new interface, either using
      custom RPCs, or a directory with several virtual files for various
      aspects of the interaction
    <antrik> (I prefer the latter variant, though I guess some people would
      argue in favour of the former :-) )
    <antrik> anyways, I'll add it to the list
    <tschwinge> OK, I see.  Nevertheless, don't you think that a more simple
      implementation of my idea (also leaving out (c) for now) wouldn't be a
      suitable GSoC project?
    <antrik> apt-get is probably quite a good example use case for this, so you
      are probably right that it would be useful to develop this together
    <antrik> (I'll leave out (c) though -- I would consider it a distinct
      project. we can place a followup task once (a)+(b) is done :-) )
    <tschwinge> Yes, sure.