Module rfc_0221_create_dir 

Create dir

• Proposal Name: create-dir
• Start Date: 2022-04-06
• RFC PR: apache/opendal#221
• Tracking Issue: apache/opendal#222

Summary

Add creating dir support for OpenDAL.

Motivation

Interoperability between OpenDAL services requires dir support. The object storage system will simulate dir operations with / via object ends. But we can’t share the same behavior with fs, as mkdir is a separate syscall.

So we need to unify the behavior about dir across different services.

Guide-level explanation

After this proposal got merged, we will treat all paths that end with / as a dir.

For example:

• read("abc/") will return an IsDir error.
• write("abc/") will return an IsDir error.
• stat("abc/") will be guaranteed to return a dir or a NotDir error.
• delete("abc/") will be guaranteed to delete a dir or NotDir / NotEmpty error.
• list("abc/") will be guaranteed to list a dir or a NotDir error.

And we will support create an empty object:

// create a dir object "abc/"
let _ = op.object("abc/").create().await?;
// create a file object "abc"
let _ = op.object("abc").create().await?;

Reference-level explanation

And we will add a new API called create to create an empty object.

struct OpCreate {
    path: String,
    mode: ObjectMode,
}

pub trait Accessor: Send + Sync + Debug {
    async fn create(&self, args: &OpCreate) -> Result<Metadata>;
}

Object will expose API like create which will call Accessor::create() internally.

Drawbacks

None

Rationale and alternatives

None

Prior art

None

Unresolved questions

When writing this proposal, io_error_more is not stabilized yet. We can’t use NotADirectory nor IsADirectory directly.

Using from_raw_os_error is unacceptable because we can’t carry our error context.

use std::io;

let error = io::Error::from_raw_os_error(22);
assert_eq!(error.kind(), io::ErrorKind::InvalidInput);

So we will use ErrorKind::Other for now, which means our users can’t check the following errors:

• IsADirectory
• DirectoryNotEmpty
• NotADirectory

Until they get stabilized.

Future possibilities

None