Replace gvfs

[probonopd]

    gnome-online-accounts: 3.36.0
    gvfs: 1.30.4_4
    libgdata: 0.17.9_1
    webkit2-gtk3: 2.30.1
    wpebackend-fdo: 1.4.1

103 MiB

[probonopd]

Webkit for Gtk? Just to mount LAN shares? Why?

[probonopd]

We should replace gvfs with something simpler, such as a combination of Zeroconf for detecting network devices and some custom code for (FUSE-)mounting them.

• gvfs comes from the Gnome stack which is not a welcome technology in helloSystem
• gvfs pulls in too many dependencies
• According to gvfsd-fuse missing in 13.0-CURRENT ISO#32 gvfs is missing in FreeBSD 13

[DamjanJovanovic]

What package are those dependencies for?

Neither gvfs git nor gvfs-1.47.90 source code contain the word "webkit".

webkit2-gtk3-2.30.2's required-by (and their entire ancestry of required-by) does not include gvfs.

What ports branch is this from?

[probonopd]

D'uh, I should have written this down. I think this was what happened when I tried to sudo pkg install gvfs on a FreeBSD 12.1 system.

[DamjanJovanovic]

The GOOGLE option adds this dependency chain:

devel/gvfs -> devel/libgdata -> net/gnome-online-accounts -> webkit2-gtk3

GOOGLE was set to off by default by this change, you probably tried gvfs before that:

commit f05c0025bbec89a4867d557bdda399857447d4d8
Author: bapt <bapt@FreeBSD.org>
Date:   Tue Oct 20 18:23:31 2020 +0000

    Remove GOOGLE option forgotten in previous commit

[probonopd]

Thank you very much. This kind of stuff is what I mean with "gvfs is entangled with a stack we don't want in helloSystem". It is biased toward using the Red Hat stack. Otherwise there would be an option to use Qt WebEngine instead of webkit2-gtk3.

[DamjanJovanovic]

You're welcome. I still think you get further by understanding the software stack, and then customizing it to your requirements.

"Keep your friends close, keep your enemies closer." If we monitored GNOME's development activity, we would know about these problems before they get unleashed on poor users. If we studied and developed gvfs further, we could make it work with Qt WebEngine if need be, without upstream help.

"Cloning doesn't work against a fast competitor", Eric Schmidt, ex-CEO of Google in his "Unwinnable Wars" talk. Consider how a decade of Btrfs development failed to out-compete ZFS, and it took LLVM $50 million dollars and many years to develop Clang to the point where it began out-competing GCC. By comparison, one 8000 line project, bsdisks, quickly got every file manager on every desktop working better than HAL did, not because it reimplemented the entire GNOME stack, but because it developed one small component in just the right place, that got both gvfs and Solid singing and dancing to our tune.

[probonopd]

I need to learn more about bsdisks.

[DamjanJovanovic]

It looks somewhat like this. gvfs and Solid use libudisks to make DBus calls to the UDisks2 DBus service, which uses udev (now part of systemd), and various Linux kernel subsystems to expose devices, partitions, filesystems and operations and events on them over DBus. The deeper you go, the more it becomes a Linux-only setup.

bsdisks pretends to be UDisks2, implementing the same DBus functions, but using FreeBSD technologies like devd, CAM, and GEOM underneath, it can mount ZFS; software above is none the wiser.

Written in C++ with Qt, which makes DBus development particularly easy, it's only about 8000 lines compared to udisks2's 38000+ lines of C/glib. It doesn't do everything yet, there is no RAID, swap, it can't format drives, etc. but those APIs don't seem generally useful, I think they're there just for GNOME Disks to consume.

[probonopd]

Written in C++ with Qt, which makes DBus development particularly easy, it's only about 8000 lines compared to udisks2's 38000+ lines of C/glib.

Now we are talking :-)

Would it be possible to use bsdisks directly in Filer, without the need for gvfs and other Gnome-ish stuff, maybe even without D-Bus?

[DamjanJovanovic]

I believe Filer should work with bsdisks (report if not), but it has to use DBus.

Use at least bsdisks version 0.25, released a few days ago.