Private and Public File Handling Love

So, my Summer of Code proposal was accepted and I figured I would start off with a post. For my project I'll be fixing up private vs public file handling in Drupal, which as I found out after awhile of talking to a handful of Drupal devs needed some work. I had originally been inspired by Wim Leer's proposal for a Drupal bittorrent tracker. It's a really cool proposal and I'm glad that it was picked up by someone else. That made me think, mirroring files must be a real pain, so automated mirroring with some metalink goodness would be pretty cool. After some discussion I found out that the file subsystem likely wouldn't be up to snuff. After talking to some more people it became clear that making a file public or private had some issues. So I guess my idea is like the idea for most startups, it changes 70% by the time something is settled on. That being said I should be able to fix some problems and get part of Drupal's file management headed in the right direction.

So right now Drupal handles public vs private file management like a sledgehammer, all files are private or they are all public. This can be problematic, and it isn't the most flexible solution. So I'll be trying to fix that up with the following:

• Make public or private occur on a per file basis rather than a sitewide basis.
• Make public and private files live peacefully so that they can occupy the same node.
• Try and make node access rights and file access rights a little more congruent.
• etc.

So in the next couple weeks I'll be getting everything figured out and getting the actual deliverables fleshed out too. It is pretty likely that I'll be working with fileAPI to get things done and it will be pretty interesting to here how things turn out. I'd be interested to here what everyone thinks.