Show HN: Rssfs – An RSS reader written as a file system

Re:Show HN: Rssfs – An RSS reader written as a file system by petercooper on Sunday May 10, 2020 @05:15PM (#23136267)

What's the benefit of offering this via FUSE rather than having a program just fetch the same material and store it in the usual filesystem with the same folder and filenames? I assume there is one and I'm missing it. (Alternatively if this is for learning/experimenting, that's OK! :-))

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Re:Show HN: Rssfs – An RSS reader written as a file system by isr on Sunday May 10, 2020 @10:07PM (#23138216)

We have a lot of tools built to interact with files. A legacy of multiple decades on Unix.

Using that same file "metaphor" to describe resources other than actual blobs to be stored on disk, is surprisingly powerful.

Something which plan9 (& inferno) explored in great depth, and is quite the eye-opening experience. Not much point rehashing the same args again here. If you're interested, check out some youtuve vids, and enjoy the deep dive into an alternative future.

To get something similar on more mainstream OS's, try plan9port and Acme (usually described as an "editor", but its more of a tmux and terminal replacement, which also happens to be able to edit and save text files)

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Re:Show HN: Rssfs – An RSS reader written as a file system by gnu on Monday May 11, 2020 @01:12AM (#23139098)

Exposing something as files is kind of like a "protocol". The alternative would have been a library (implemented in a language) that would make things confine itself to the ecosystem of the language. Instead, anyone who can talk to files and directories can interact with this program!

There are applications where this may not entirely be a match though..

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Re:Show HN: Rssfs – An RSS reader written as a file system by clktmr on Sunday May 10, 2020 @06:58PM (#23137102)

Not OP, but the benefit of the filesystem implementation is probably to only fetch the data on read.

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Re:Show HN: Rssfs – An RSS reader written as a file system by rhabarba on Monday May 11, 2020 @12:22AM (#23138886)

Which is not really done yet either. I might add that... I’ll work on it tonight (CEST), probably.

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Re:Show HN: Rssfs – An RSS reader written as a file system by rhabarba on Monday May 11, 2020 @03:25AM (#23139677)

Done (poorly).

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Re:Show HN: Rssfs – An RSS reader written as a file system by totony on Sunday May 10, 2020 @08:04PM (#23137492)

Having files as common interface has been popular in microkernels and unix for a long time now

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