[Twisted-Python] unified filesystem API

[John Santos]

On 5/19/2020 4:54 AM, Barry Scott wrote:
> On Saturday, 16 May 2020 02:14:57 BST Ian Haywood wrote:
>> On 16/05/2020 10:55 am, Ian Haywood wrote:
>>> On 15/05/2020 10:52 am, Glyph wrote:
>>>> y 14, 2020, at 5:23 PM, Wilfredo Sánchez Vega <wsanchez at wsanche
>>>> <mailto:wsanchez at wsanchez.net>
>>>>
>>>>>    I think it's great to get an SMB implementation in the Twisted
>>>>> org, but why would we even consider adding something like this to
>>>>> the main Twisted project?
>>> The advantage of twisted itself is cross-protocol abstractions such as
>>> cred. Of course you don't have to be in the repo to use them, but in
>>> practice developers need the discipline of a single project to
>>> maintain consistency, otherwise the human tendency to reinvent wheels
>>> is too strong
>> Apropos we have two APIs for exporting filesystems which are broadly
>> similar: SFTP in conch and FTP itself, SMB is about to be a third,
>> ideally we should have one or have them descend from one another. It's
>> slightly harder than it sounds as SMB is a file-access, as opposed to
>> file-transfer, protocol and supports some extra features such as locking.
> I do not see a common class tree works for things that are so different
> as SMB and FTP.
>
> Barry

I don't think the commonality lies on the network side of things.  I think it is
on the data manipulation side and the local file read/write side, which are currently
inherantly synchronous unless you use threads and all that entails.

All three protocols have to open existing files, create new files, read from files,
write to files, read file metadata (dates, sizes, etc.), write metadata, traverse
directory trees and packetize and send the various types of data and recieve and
depacketize the data.  Only the packetizing and depacketizing items are significantly
different between SMB and the other two protocols.  (SMB access to file data can be
random or sequential, wherease FTP and SFTP are invariably sequential, but that should
easily be accomodated.)



-- 
John Santos
Evans Griffiths & Hart, Inc.
781-861-0670 ext 539