easyfuse

An ambigious attempt to wrap the amazing rust-fuse project in idiomatic Rust.

The regular fuse project requires you to write code like

fn operation(&mut self, req: &Request, inode: u64, reply: ReplyKind) {
    let value = match thing() {
        Ok(ok) => ok,
        Err(err) => {
            reply.error(err);
            return;
        },
    };
    reply.do_thing(value + 1);
}

, mainly because instead of using return values like Result, they use different Reply structs as arguments. On top of it, most/all Reply structs have an error function, but there's no common trait that adds these.

So while the fuse project is great for low-level applications, you can see how writing bigger projects in it can take a lot of time and boilerplate. With a tiny bit of abstraction, we can do better.

fn operation(&mut self, req: &mut Request) -> Result<returns::Kind> {
    let value = thing()?;
    value + 1
}

---

Meet EasyFuse. It's a high-level wrapper around rust-fuse that

1. Lets each trait function return a Result.
2. Defines newtypes for different integer types to avoid mixing them up.
3. Makes each node into its own struct, making it easy to combine different filesystem components into one larger filesystem, like the holy GNU intended.

EasyFuse changes the way you implement fuse filesystems. Instead of implementing an entire filesystem, you simply implement one file or one directory (commonly called one "resource"), and then compose them together.

It also comes with a few standard resource types, such as a static directory. This is useful for when you want to glue together multiple dynamic filesystems with a static prefix.