userspace filesystems

Once a year I do a "filemanager" poll: I check on the status of two-pane file managers, looking for something that resembles Total Commander, only in Unix.

This year I ran into gnome-commander while looking for a file-manager that would support libgnomevfs (with its exotic sshfs, smbfs and so on).

It strikes me odd, the fact that there is so much code duplication between user-space filesystem projects. There are three levels of userspace filesystem implementations on Linux software right now:

• Virtual filesystems implemented within the file-manager (such as a virtual filesystem for tar.gz contents)
  
• Userspace filesystems exported via libraries (and object broker services), to applications (such as gnomevfs sshfs module, or samba kio-slave)
  
• Kernel-assisted userspace filesystems, accessible by all applications, but requiring manual setup (see FUSE-related projects)
  

Is there a way to unite these projects so that people don't have to write the same code over and over again? Shouldn't a newly mounted userspace filesystem, be available to all applications and not just the one that generated it?

More on this later.

Eternity and a Day

This is Theo Angelopoulos' view on the crossing to the Other side. The frame says it all.

for Badi

I love Badi Assad's music.

It is sincere, sweet and meticulously played.

Badi herself is a wonderful person. I had the chance of enjoying
one of her shows here in Athens last year. I hope she
visits us again soon..

This is her home on the web.

Her album Verde has a version of Bjork's Bachelorette
that still haunts me..

"if you forget my name..you will go astray..."