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We should stay in state 2. until one sends a signal to finish with the archive.

12. Eclipse enabled VFS JARs

The problem: Currently extending VFS with new file system providers cannot be done in an elegant manner. Special code needs to be written to register new file systems for new schemas.

A possible solution: The VFS project could make use of the powerful plugin mechanism available in Eclipse (actually they are migrating towards the OSGi plugin model).

The whole idea would be to be able to extends VFS with new file system providers using the Eclipse plugin model (with extensions to VFS extension points). The standard file system manager could be extended: if the Eclipse runtime is detected to be running then it could use the Eclipse runtime's mechanisms to identify extensions to the VFS extension points. If the Eclipse runtime is not running it could fall back to the existing provider initialization found in StandardFileSystemManager.

In the JCommander project we had a file system abstraction layer that worked this way and we found it very easy and elegant to provide additional file system implementation. Actually now that we have moved over to VFS we will implement this functionality. When this implementation will be provided then it could be analyzed if it is suited to the base VFS distribution.

Having these would make it much easier for third parties to extend VFS.

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new filesystems

• pop, imap (useable for emails)
• mime (for the email itself - pretty much like an archive)

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