Re: [tlug] Common bus over devices

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <turnbull.stephen.fw@example.com>]

Raymond Wan writes:

 > Of course, one can just put the files into Syncthing / Dropbox and add
 > a symbolic link from the home directory to these files to have them
 > automatically sync (provided it's the same application on the computer
 > and mobile device...  Sometimes, standards would help...  :-) ).

Like say, NFS, AFS, and SMB?  There's also the Coda and Unison caching
network file systems (which aren't standards in the sense of having
multiple interoperable implementations but do have well-defined,
well-documented network protocols).  And then there's the network
block device protocol.

Thing is, all of these have the fundamental problem that they don't
behave well in programs that rely heavily on POSIX semantics from a
file system, especially the caching file systems.  Each has its own
tradeoffs, which are tuned to different needs.  For example, Coda is
absolutely horrible for large files, because to implement POSIX
semantics on open(2) the first thing it does on a cache miss is
download the whole file, and the calling program blocks while doing
so.  Unpleasant for viewing movies, say.  But for lots of small files
with usage pattern suited to the LRU caching algorithm (pre-pack
git!), it goes great.  YMMV is the word of the day here.

Steve