gri6507 has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Fellow Monks,

last night I found out about Google Filesystem (more info here), which, as I understand it, allows both Windows and *NIX based machines to mount a "remote drive", which is actually that user's Gmail account. it's areal novel idea of sharing info between computers!.

Anyways, the link above is a Python implementation. Frankly, I am not very good a Python and, as a result, I don't feel comfortable working with it. Doing a quick search both here and on Google (hehe) did not yield any results for a perl version of the same. Does anyone here know if such a beast exists?

Thanks in advance.

  • Comment on Perl implementation of Google Filesystem

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Re: Perl implementation of Google Filesystem
by marto (Cardinal) on May 16, 2006 at 13:24 UTC
    Hi gri6507,

    A quick search of Cpan for 'Gmail' returns (among others) Net::FS::Gmail which may be of interest to you.

    The page you link to does not mention "Google Filesystem", it refers to "Gmail Filesystem", which could explain why you didn't find any results when you searched.

    Hope this helps.

    Martin
[reply]
      Gmail filesystem (gmailfs) is actually a type of a filesystem (just like NTFS and ext3). From what I've been able to tell, Google Filesystem seems to be an application which uses FUSE to mount a "drive" which, when written to, simply sends an email with an attachment to Gmail and, when read from, simply retrieves the email and its attachment. In other words it seems to be a filesystem comprized of emails as files or rather inodes. In other words, unless I'm missing something, gmailfs is only a part of what Google Filesystem application does.
[reply]
        gri6507,

        Your reply in confusing to me. You link to a GmailFS tool implemented in Python, then you say you have searched but can't find a Perl equivalent (I suggested a module from Cpan). Perhaps you need to clarify things by reading that page you link to again, finding out what it is and how it works, and if this is what your interested in. Or are you referring to Google File System which is not to be confused with GmailFS. An extract from the wiki:

        "Also it's noteworthy that this filesystem should not be misunderstood as it were GoogleFS, the filesystem created by Google for use in heavyweight servers hard storage, adjusted for performance and large-file handling features."

        Martin
[reply]

        Have you actually read the site you've linked to ? That thing also uses FUSE, and it doesn't work on Win32, for exactly the reasons you cite . It can't work under Windows because FUSE is "just a filesystem like NTFS and ext3", except that it asks a userland process to supply/store the data.

[reply]

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