mc/lib/vfs/HACKING

Intended audience
=================

This document is intended for everybody who wants to understand VFS
code.  Knowledge of programming is a must.


Preface
=======

While VFS should be considered an excellent idea, which came ahead of
its time, the implementation used in GNU Midnight Commander is now
showing its age.

The VFS code was left us without any decent documentation.  Most
functions don't have comments explaining what they do.  Most comments
describe quirks and implementation details, rather than the intended
functionality of the code.  This document is an attempt to reconstruct
understanding of the VFS code and help its future developers.

Being the part of GNU Midnight Commander most exposed to potential
security threats, the VFS code needs to be kept is a good shape. 
Understanding the code is the key to making and keeping it secure.


Basics of code organization
===========================

VFS code it to a certain extent object oriented.  The code dealing with
a certain type of data (e.g. tar archives) can be thought
of as a class in the terms of object oriented programming.  They may
reuse some code from their parent classes.  For instance, tar and cpio
archives have a common parent class direntry, which contains some common
code for archives.

Individual archives or connections can be considered as instances of
those classes.  They provide POSIX like interface to their structure,
but don't expose that structure directly to the common VFS layer.

Each VFS object has a directory tree associated with it.  The tree
consists of entries for files and directories.  In some VFS classes, the
entries have names and a are associated with nameless inodes, which
contain information such as size, timestamps and other data normally
contained in POSIX "struct stat".

File vfs.c serves as a multiplexor.  It exports functions similar to
POSIX but with "mc_" prepended to them.  For example, mc_open() will act
like open(), but will treat VFS names in a special way.

Common utility functions not intended to be used outside the VFS code
should go to utilvfs.c and possibly to other files.  Presently, there is
a lot of such code in vfs.c.


Hierarchy of classes
====================

vfs ---- direntry ---- cpio  } archives
   |            | ---- tar   }
   |            |
   |            | ---- fish  } remote systems
   |            | ---- ftpfs }
   |
   |---- extfs ---- extfs archives
   |---- localfs ---- sfs ---- sfs archives
   |---- undelfs


Properties of classes
=====================

                   read only    inode->entry   local cache   full tree
                                mapping                      loaded

cpio               yes*         yes*           no            yes
tar                yes*         yes*           no            yes
fish               no           yes            yes           no
ftpfs              no           yes            yes           no
extfs              no           no             yes           yes
localfs            no           no             N/A           N/A
sfs                no           yes            yes           N/A
undelfs            no           yes            no            yes


"*" means that this property should change during further development.
Mapping from inode to entry prevents implementing hard links.  It is
permissible for directories, which cannot be hardlinked.  Not loading
the full tree speeds up access to large archives and conserves memory.


Stamping
========

Stamping is the VFS equivalent of garbage collection.  It's purpose is
to destroy unreferenced VFS objects, in other words close archives or
connections once they are unused for some time.  There is a tree of
items representing VFS objects.  The common layer doesn't know the
structure of the pointers, but it knows the class that should handle the
pointer.  Every item has a timestamp.  Once the timestamp becomes too
old, the object is freed.

There are ways to keep objects alive if they are used.  Also, objects
can have parent objects, which are freed together with there original
object if they are otherwise unreferenced.