Re: webdav advice sought

[Thomas Lord]

On Tue, 2009-06-23 at 21:09 -0400, David Reitter wrote:
> On Jun 23, 2009, at 7:26 PM, Thomas Lord wrote:
> >
> > I would like Emacs to be able to treat WebDAV servers
> > as a regular file system - to be able to "find-file"
> > a WebDAV file, to be able to save files, to have dired
> > work and so forth.
> 
> What advantages do you see in implementing this in Emacs rather than  
> doing this at the operating system level where other file systems are  
> implemented (or maybe using FUSE)?

1. Portability

2. Ultimately, being able to take advantage of a full
   DAV API rather than being limited to a POSIX API.

This isn't to say that an OS-level DAV gateway
isn't useful.

If I had "infinite resources and speed" I would 
cons up a version of Emacs (and many other programs)
with no (directly made) POSIX calls at all.  
Instead, use an HTTP-based API as the system call
mechanism, DAV as the basis of file system system
calls, routable URLs regarded as processes (some of
which create new processes in response to certain
forms of request), XML as the primary means of
marshalling and unmarshalling structured data in
messages. and so forth.   You could think of it 
as a bit like the HURD but generalized.


-t