README

9P KIO slave written in Python
This package is redistributed under the MIT license, copyright Jens Staal.

This is a work-in progress attempt and I have no experience with python from before.
In order for Version 0.0.1 to be released, the following criteria need to be fullfilled:
- the KIO slave should work as a 9P client (that is, a 9P share should be accessible from Dolphin or Konqueror via 9p://<URL>)
 
Objectives: 

This kio slave aims to provide 9P2000 capabilities to KDE. This could be used in many ways
- proof-of-concept implementation (alternative more performant ones can be made later)
- 9P protocol for KDE browsers (Konqueror, Rekonq) similar to Anant's web9 for mozilla
- accessing 9P shares in a similar way as for ssh (fish), CIFS (samba) etc
- if possible, a pre-programmed link to "sources" (Bell labs' /n/sources) under "Network"
- if possible, an easy way to serve directories via 9P from KDE.
- if possible, enable integration between KDE and plan9port (acme, plumbing,devwsys) and/or 9vx via 9P
- if possible, enable access to various system components (cpu, proc ...) via a 9P interface

Information sources

info about KIO slaves in python imported from:
http://wiki.python.org/moin/IoSlavesTutorial
and info about py9p gleanded from /usr/bin/{cl, localsrv, simplesrv}.py from py9p package + direct inspection of libraries in py9p
(example client and server implementations of py9p)
The problem right now is to know how to feed info back and forth from those functions to those of the KIO implementation.

Strategy:

The first objective is to implement 9P client functionality to the KIO slave
the most important information source for this implementation is
/usr/bin/cl.py from the py9p package and the generic info that can be found about implementing a python KIO slave.


Future plans:

An alternative C/C++ implementation utilizing libixp for the 9P protocol, which should be faster.