rsync as a remote file system protocol?

[Adam J. Richter]

	Does anyone know of an existing facility to access a remote
rsync server as a virtual filesystem through gnome-vfs, FUSE, lufs, or
similar that supports listing the contents of directories?

	I have already a bunch of web searches, looked through
http://fuse.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/FileSystems, checked my
/usr/lib/gnome-vfs-2.0/modules/, and checked the list of available KDE
kio slaves on my system.

	In case anyone is curious, I want to monitor a bunch of
sourceforge directories for changes, which I used to do by the
gnomevfs-ftp back when ftp1.sourceforge.net at least allowed directory
listings.  As far as I know, the sourceforge directory tree is not
available over any other remote filesystem protocol (FTP, NFS, webDAV,
or a _computer-friendly_ http interface).  This is surprising, since a
number of research file systems exist on Linux supporting read only
access to replicated file servers which update relatively infrequently
and do deletions even less frequently (Andrew file system,
Presto/Lento, etc.).

	I could probably more easily do something application specific
by repeatedly invoking "rsync --list-only", but if it's not much more
work, I think I may try to write the sort of virtual file system
interface for rsync I have described, in the hopes that it would also
be useful for others, but I ask here to make sure would not be
duplicating something that is already available.

Adam Richter