Fuse perl bindings
==================

Fuse is combination of Linux kernel module and user space library which
enables you to write user-space filesystems. This module enables you to
write filesystems using perl.

Additional file-systems using Fuse module are released on CPAN using Fuse::
namespace. Currently that includes only Fuse::DBI which allows you to mount
database as file system, but there will be more.

This is a pre-production release.  It seems to work quite well.  In fact, I
can't find any problems with it whatsoever.  If you do, I want to know.

INSTALLATION

To install this module type the standard commands as root:

   perl Makefile.PL
   make
   make test
   make install


DEPENDENCIES

This module requires the FUSE C library and the FUSE kernel module.
See http://fuse.sourceforge.net/

If you intend to use FUSE in threaded mode, you need a version of Perl which
has been compiled with USE_ITHREADS.  Then, you need to use threads and
threads::shared.


COPYRIGHT AND LICENCE

This is contributed to the FUSE project by Mark Glines <mark@glines.org>,
and is therefore subject to the same license and copyright as FUSE itself.
Please see the AUTHORS and COPYING files from the FUSE distribution for
more information.


EXAMPLES

There are a few example scripts.  You can find them in the examples/
subdirectory.  These are:

* example.pl, a simple "Hello world" type of script

* loopback.pl, a filesystem loopback-device.  like fusexmp from
               the main FUSE dist, it simply recurses file operations
               into the real filesystem.  Unlike fusexmp, it only
               re-shares files under the /tmp/test directory.

* rmount.pl, an NFS-workalike which tunnels through SSH.  It requires
             an account on some ssh server (obviously), with public-key
             authentication enabled.  (if you have to type in a password,
             you don't have this.  man ssh_keygen.).  Copy rmount_remote.pl
             to your home directory on the remote machine, and create a
             subdir somewhere, and then run it like:
             ./rmount.pl host /remote/dir /local/dir

* rmount_remote.pl, a ripoff of loopback.pl meant to be used as a backend
                    for rmount.pl.


BUGS

At time of writing, Perl (5.8.7) did not support shared subroutine references.
Symptoms include a cryptic error message like "Invalid value for shared scalar"
from Fuse.pm.  Until this is fixed, if you use threaded mode, you need to use
symbolic references (i.e. passing "main::cb" instead of \&cb).  This doesn't
allow things like closures, lexical subs and that sort of thing, but it does
work for me.

Currently tests have been attempted and succeeded on:
  * Ubuntu 10.10/amd64
  * Ubuntu 11.04/amd64
  * Debian 5.0/powerpc
  * CentOS 5.6/amd64
  * NetBSD 5.1/i386
  * NetBSD 5.1/amd64
  * FreeBSD 8.2/i386
  * FreeBSD 8.2/amd64
  * MacOS X 10.6.7

Note that on NetBSD, there are several bugs in libpuffs and librefuse
which prevent some tests from succeeding. There are fixes in NetBSD's
MAIN branch, specifically revisions 1.26 and 1.27 on src/lib/libpuffs/subr.c,
which correct the issues that cause the test failures. However, there is
still a bug in librefuse that causes readdir() to only be called once.
We will be addressing this with the appropriate developers in the near
future.

Also note that on NetBSD and FreeBSD, extended attributes do not work. These
are specifics related to the FUSE implementations on those platforms.