Lazy scanning when virtual files are enabled

[marcotrevisan]

It would be great to make it possible for the "virtual files" functionality to work more lazily:

• First sync: instead of spanning the entire folder hierarchy, limit to the first level or two, then trigger further scans only when the user actually opens the root folders, like other virtual drive clients currently do.
• Synchronization: as a consequence, only sync the already scanned folders, ignoring changes that are out of that span.
• There could even be a de-hydration policy like "least recently used" or similar, to keep the synchronization set as small as possible in the long term.

The basic idea behind this is that :

• the typical user needs to be able to start working on his/her workspace as quickly as possible, without minding about the contents outside those sub-folders.
• the client should be able to scale reasonably well on big folder hierarchies in order to be competitive (or even viable as a solution). Ideally there should be the same kind of user experience (including responsiveness) when the user has to work on documents in a small share or in a very big one.

Thanks!

[marcotrevisan]

Just for the records... saw this:

https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2021/10182/

NSFileProviderReplicatedExtension seems to provide:

• all of the above;
• a nice and native implementation of virtual files out of the box;
• perhaps a reduction of the code needed to implement the NC client on mac, since all of the sync logic is handled by the system.

As a mac user this seems to be one of the best possible approaches right now...

Thanks!

[marcotrevisan]

#1337 should close this and is in progress now, yay!

[marcotrevisan]

(closed this because the new macOS implementation basically fulfills this request and I'm using Mac OS)