Comments on: When things go really bad…and nobody notices it for years

By: Stu

Stu — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

Hmm when I was using linux exclusively I did have a “feeling” that sometimes nautilus would loose data, esp when copying large amounts of files around but only sometimes… although I did use it a lot, it still seemed like it could sometimes go wrong, maybe this is part of it…

By: Tiago Bugarin

Tiago Bugarin — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

Christian or any one, please, explain it to me. Will next Gnome release have this stuff fixed or this is thing that will demand more time to fix?
Should I trust Gnome as it is right now or should I go to KDE while waiting for this fix? (I am using Ubuntu Breezy at the time in my pc)
I am not a developer and I can not measure how deep this problem is or how much it will touch my day-to-day work so please don’t understand this as a flame or such. I am just trying to understand.
Thank you all.

By: Klaus Kinski

Klaus Kinski — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

This sounds like a serious issue that can not be tracked and fixed easily. There are so many gnome-vfs depending apps outside and some of them even work around things, others switched to things like curl or neko to do file handling.

Fixing gnome-vfs would mean that it needs totally rewrite in many areas.

By: Andreas Mohr

Andreas Mohr — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

I’m not a GNOME user, but almost the *first time* (and certainly the last time, who’d have thunk that) I actually touched nautilus (to do some file operation with my personal SMB folder), I immediately lost the whole folder content and had to ask the (Windows!) IT guys for the last backup – how embarrassing! That was with a nautilus version from early RHEL3, sorry, I don’t remember too many specifics any more.
This told me instantly to stay the “§$% away from such “software”.
BTW, this had been almost the *only* data loss (minus losing a /usr partition due to very experimental kernel once, fortunately backupped) within a decade of almost exclusively using Linux…

OK, so this comment is more flame-style than helpful, but still it tells you something about software reliability.

Anyway, thanks for highlighting this critical issue in such an important low-level component!

By: Alexander Larsson

Alexander Larsson — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

This blog entry is wrong. The async callback is always called on errors (although not always on normal progress).

By: garbeam

garbeam — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

In my opinion GnomeVFS is totally over-engineered and totally crap. Instead I recommend 9P:
http://plan9.escet.urjc.es/magic/man2html/5/0intro

Instead of reinventing the wheel, this fs-IO protocol has been used for years adequately in distributed, network-transparent ways. Recently also a Linux kernel module appeared (since 2.6.14) which supports to mount 9P-based file servers to the native VFS.

By: Erich Schubert

Erich Schubert — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

Any chance that KDE and GNOME end up with a common solution?
I guess the current KDE stuff is C++ again, so probably not as well-suited for adoption by GNOME, but maybe there could still be a solution that can be adopted by both worlds sometime.
"Freedesktop.org" pops into my mind somehow... and, I just noticed, there is already some VFS thingy there: http://freedesktop.org/wiki/Software_2fdvfs