[X4U] Finder plugin like this? GMail Drive shell extension

[Stroller]

On Jul 21, 2005, at 2:17 am, Robert Nicholson wrote:

> Is there any for OSX that provide a similar facility?
> as www.viksoe.dk/gmail

It doesn't say whether this uses GmalFS (referenced on that page) or  
whether it's compatible with that implementation, but that's written in  
Python, so it should be possible to run it on Mac OS X or port it.

The question is whether you'd really want to.

If you look at the "Implementation Overview" and "Isses" sections of  
[1], you'll see that this is quite an interesting hack but the autor  
states that "GmailFS is an alpha release and should be treated as such.  
It WILL be buggy" and "Performance is acceptable for ... very large  
files ... however operations like ls -l on a large directory which  
requires lots of round-trips are extremely slow." Essentially this is a  
filesystem over a webpage over http which then runs on another  
filesystem (possibly Google's distributed GFS); it might be that a  
skilled programer (as the author undoubtedly is) could make such an  
implementation reliable, given time and sufficient development, but it  
will always be hideously inefficient. This is something that someone  
wrote to prove that it could be done, because Geekiness is cool,  
because he wanted to, and not because it's really a good idea.

As Matt says: "more than likely there are a number of TOS clauses being  
violated by using your Gmail account this way. Speaking for myself, I  
would find an alternative. GoDaddy has super cheap hosting that you  
could just mount as an FTP addy on your desktop." [2]

Stroller.




[1]  
http://richard.jones.name/google-hacks/gmail-filesystem/gmail- 
filesystem.html
[2]  
http://channels.lockergnome.com/it/archives/ 
20050412_gmail_file_system_is_so_tempting.phtml