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Normal file read/write support with the GVFS MTP backend!

A couple of weeks ago, Han-Wen Nienhuys, the author of go-mtpfs, pointed out to me that Android’s MTP implementation includes a set of methods that allow you to do normal read and write operations on files without having to do the whole download/upload dance. With these extensions, you can expose files in the way that most people expect – you can just open a text file, picture, video etc, make changes and save it back. As a bonus, this functionality also allows you to do very useful operations like copy or move a file on the device.

I’ve now had a chance to put together an initial implementation of support for these extensions, and my PPA is in the process of rebuilding packages, so people can try them out easily. I’ve not started the upstreaming process on the GVFS changes as I still need to get the libmtp changes approved and upstreamed, but the libmtp maintainer has been AWOL for a few weeks now.

Obviously, it’s important to remember that these extensions are Android specific and won’t help you if you have a non-Android device, nor if your Android device doesn’t use Google’s MTP implementation (which, unfortunately, includes most Samsung devices).

You can grab Ubuntu packages from my ppa and the source is available on my github page.

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