[coldsync-hackers] VFS hackery

[Christophe Beauregard <christophe dot beauregard at sympatico.ca>]

Hi all.

I've been playing around with some VFS conduits and I figure I'd see if I 
can get some feedback on my approach (as usual, I'm tracking CVS here).

First conduit is called backup-vfs 
(http://www3.sympatico.ca/lou.latendresse/coldsync/backup-vfs). In a 
nutshell, it keeps a backup of any cards found during sync in 
~/.palm/<cardname>. It's a bit stupid right now (i.e. doesn't handle 
deletions), but otherwise it works nicely except for performance (Palm sync 
isn't the fastest way to move that much data, although my periodic system 
lockups might just be telling me that VIA's got crappy USB support).

Card readers are obviously better for bulk transfers, but my goal is to make 
the data on the card available to fetch/dump conduits during sync. A card 
reader won't do that easily. And my card reader isn't all that handy...

The second conduit is install-vfs 
(http://www3.sympatico.ca/lou.latendresse/coldsync/install-vfs) and 
basically allows you to map a MIME type to a directory on a card. Drop a 
file of that MIME type into ~/.palm/install and watch it get placed on the 
card. Nothing fancy, except that it's smart enough to detect a directory 
created by backup-vfs and make a copy to avoid the extra download.

Does this approach make any sense at all? Useful to anyone?

c.