There was an article from a while back as to why Google wasn't working on gdrive faster and one of their engineering managers was quoted as saying something to the effect of "why are we syncing files? Who needs files, we have everything on the web". But unfortunately I can't find that reference right now.
But it doesn't seem too far a stretch to think that some web-heavy companies prefer web solutions with as "stateless" clients as possible.
https://github.com/astrada/google-drive-ocamlfuse/
https://github.com/jcline/fuse-google-drive
Didn't get much attention when it was posted here 267 days ago:
Correlation, or causation? It's complicated.
But part of the attraction for Drive, Dropbox, and Ubuntu One is that the data is all on your local disk, so should still be accessible even if you're offline or there is a problem with the service.
Making access to the local copy of the files depend on the client program being up is inherently more fragile.
Now if you want to _not_ have them local, but rather fetch them lazily on demand, Fuse would be a good choice. It does open up a fair bit more complexity to do with scheduling and abandoning requests when programs assume the filesystem is as fast and reliable as a local one, similar to NFS.
I think a read-through client could be good for v2.0, but getting local sync to a real filesystem working well would be better for 1.0.
FUSE is a natural choice if you want fully integrated and transparent access to so-called "cloud storage" services. Performance overhead isn't so much of an issue, you'll probably manage to max out most home broadband services even with the several layers of syscalls.
You'll have less to remember, throw a line in fstab (or mount it in your shell's rc) and it's all just there, no sync commands to remember, just grab your favourite application and start hammering away at your files.
It works really well in my experience. Not quite as slick as the install-and-forget-it nature of Google Drive for Win/Mac, or Dropbox for Win/Mac/Linux, but it does what it says on the tin and I like that because it is fully FOSS I can easily take it with me on ARM/Linux.
Still not quite as nice as the other clients which subscribe to file change notifications, but more seamless than running it manually for sure.
Still, an interesting implementation and an alternative for python-gdata.
