KIOFuse – GSoC 2019

It’s been a great pleasure to be chosen to work with KDE during GSoC this year. I’ll be working on KIOFuse and hopefully by the end of the coding period it will be well integrated with KIO itself. Development will mainly by coordinated on the #kde-fm channel (IRC Nick: feverfew) with fortnightly updates on my blog so feel free to pop by! Here’s a small snippet of my proposal to give everyone an idea of what I’ll be working on:

KIOSlaves are a powerful feature within the KIO framework, allowing KIO-aware applications
such as Dolphin to interact with services out of the local filesystem over URLs such as fish://
and gdrive:/. However, KIO-unaware applications are unable to interact seamlessly with KIO
Slaves. For example, editing a file in gdrive:/ in LibreOffice will not save changes to your Google Drive. One potential solution is to make use of FUSE, which is an interface provided
by the Linux kernel, which allows userspace processes to provide a filesystem which can be
mounted and accessed by regular applications. ​KIOFuse is a project by fvogt that
allows the possibility to mount KIO filesystems in the local system; therefore exposing them to
POSIX-compliant applications such as Firefox and LibreOffice.

This project intends to polish KIOFuse such that it is ready to be a KDE project. In particular,
I’ll be focusing on the following four broad goals:
• ​Improving compatibility with KDE and non-KDE applications by extending and improving
supported filesystem operations.
• ​Improving KIO Slave support.
• ​Performance and usability improvements.
• ​Adding a KDE Daemon module to allow the management of KIOFuse mounts and the
translation of KIO URLs to their local path equivalents.