[Gluster-devel] [RFC] Reducing maintenance burden and moving fuse support to an external project

[Niels de Vos]

At the moment we have three top-level interfaces to maintain in Gluster,
these are FUSE, Gluster/NFS and gfapi. If any work is needed to support
new options, FOPs or other functionalities, we mostly have to do the
work 3x. Often one of the interfaces gets forgotten, or does not need
the new feature immediately (backlog++). This is bothering me every now
and then, specially when bugs get introduced and need to get fixed in
different ways for these three interfaced.

One of my main goals is to reduce the code duplication, and move
everything to gfapi. We are on a good way to use NFS-Ganesha instead of
Gluster/NFS already. In a similar approach, I would love to see
deprecating our xlators/mount sources[0], and have it replaced by
xglfs[1] from Oleksandr.

Having the FUSE mount binaries provided by a separate project should
make it easier to implement things like subdirectory mounts (Samba and
NFS-Ganesha already do this in some form through gfapi).

xglfs is not packaged in any distribution yet, this allows us to change
the current commandline interface to something we deem more suitable (if
so).

I would like to get some opinions from others, and if there are no
absolute objections, we can work out a plan to make xglfs an alternative
to the fuse-bridge and eventually replace it.

Thanks,
Niels


0. https://github.com/gluster/glusterfs/tree/master/xlators/mount
1. https://github.com/gluster/xglfs
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