interesting project that I can implement with fuse-python

Question

Hi,

I was thinking of improving my python and just recently read an article about the python-fuse library. I'm always interested about filesystem stuff so I thought this would be a good library to hack on.

What I can't come up with is an idea of what I should implement with this. Do you guys have any suggestions or ideas that you can share?

Answer 1

I do not know if python is appropriate, but maybe you can provide URL handlers for fuse in Firefox.

for example: sshfs://host/path would allow to explore remote ssh host via Firefox browser.

Answer 2

Maybe a filesystem where files behave like directories, so you can store files in files. Or a filesystem where you can store files with the same name in 1 directory.

Answer 3

The typical 'cool' things with FUSE are exposing in a filesystem interface things that aren't files, and usually are stored somewhere else.

Existing examples: Gmail filesystem, SSH filesystem. Non existing (that I know of) examples: a Twitter filesystem, that shows tweets as files. Or a Stack Overflow filesystem, questions and answers as files.

Answer 4

Mounting an xml file as a filesystem, where elements are directories, and their contents is stored as a plain file. The attributes are stored in an "attributes" file as newline separated name: value pairs in each directory.

This would allow XML to be modified using the common shell tools. (sed, grep, mkdir, rm, rmdir, cat, vim, etc...) An elegant solution would have to be found for multiple elements with the same name.

So it's a bit far field. You never said that it had to be a good idea.

Answer 5

What about a versioned file-system? It has always seemed like a cool idea since I read about the implementation in Plan 9. You wouldn't have to write the versioning part as you could use an off-the-shelf version control like git. The contents of the repository could be exposed as a file hierarchy, older versions could be read-only directories and write access to files in the repository could trigger a commit.

The original versions of sshfs used a FUSE frontend that fired shell commands out the back to move around in the target file-system. You could implement something similar quite easily to output git commands and act on the repository.