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Canonical's first cloud filesystem for Ubuntu One used Fuse, then it was later rewritten away from it, and became much more reliable. Correlation, or causation

Canonical's first cloud filesystem for Ubuntu One used Fuse, then it was later rewritten away from it, and became much more reliable. Correlation, or causation? It's complicated. But part of the attraction for Drive, Dropbox, and Ubuntu One is that the data is all on your local disk, so should still be accessible even if you're offline or there is a problem with the service. Making access to the local copy of the files depend on the client program being up is inherently more fragile. Now if you want to _not_ have them local, but rather fetch them lazily on demand, Fuse would be a good choice. It does open up a fair bit more complexity to do with scheduling and abandoning requests when programs assume the filesystem is as fast and reliable as a local one, similar to NFS. I think a read-through client could be good for v2.0, but getting local sync to a real filesystem working well would be better for 1.0.

zx2c4 14y ago
Good point; I'm compelled. Dropbox style local syncers vs remote file systems. I see.
- zurn 14y ago
  I've had a Ubuntu laptop in development with root fs top of fuse (ntfs-3g) for 2+ years without a hitch. It's easily fast enough too.
  - zx2c4 14y ago
    This. Oh god no. No. Don't put your root fs on fuse. Or put ntfs on root. Please, for your own good? Or am I being trolled? I'm probably being trolled. I'm being trolled, right guys? Right?
    - zurn 14y ago
      That's what I thought when I discovered how it worked. The "WUBI" install type is (was?) a supported install type in Ubuntu. But it's been working fine and I can't think any fundamental reason why it would be unsound. I should say there have been non-fuse related hitches with the integration with Ubuntu (grub problems).
  - plywoodtrees 14y ago
    Fuse backed by a local filesystem is a different proposition to Fuse backed by a network service. There's nothing about running filesystem code through Fuse that makes it inherently more risky. However, accessing a filesystem over the network does make it unavoidably more likely it will be slow or unreachable, and not just in straightforward ways.

zx2c4 14y ago

Good point; I'm compelled. Dropbox style local syncers vs remote file systems. I see.

zurn 14y ago
I've had a Ubuntu laptop in development with root fs top of fuse (ntfs-3g) for 2+ years without a hitch. It's easily fast enough too.
- zx2c4 14y ago
  This. Oh god no. No. Don't put your root fs on fuse. Or put ntfs on root. Please, for your own good? Or am I being trolled? I'm probably being trolled. I'm being trolled, right guys? Right?
  - zurn 14y ago
    That's what I thought when I discovered how it worked. The "WUBI" install type is (was?) a supported install type in Ubuntu. But it's been working fine and I can't think any fundamental reason why it would be unsound. I should say there have been non-fuse related hitches with the integration with Ubuntu (grub problems).
- plywoodtrees 14y ago
  Fuse backed by a local filesystem is a different proposition to Fuse backed by a network service. There's nothing about running filesystem code through Fuse that makes it inherently more risky. However, accessing a filesystem over the network does make it unavoidably more likely it will be slow or unreachable, and not just in straightforward ways.