Speaker
Description
GFAL command-line tools provide a convenient, uniform interface to heterogeneous storage. For protocols already supported by XRootD, however, much of the underlying functionality exists natively but is spread across xrdfs, xrdcp, XrdCl, XrdClHttp, and the Python bindings.
This presentation describes ongoing work toward a coherent native XRootD interface for common GFAL workflows. An exploratory fsspec-based implementation served as an executable compatibility study, clarifying the required semantics, ergonomics, and testing strategy. The resulting design extends the existing XRootD stack instead of introducing another transfer engine: xrdfs provides a unified command surface, copy operations reuse the established xrdcp implementation, and reusable functionality lives in XrdCl, XrdClHttp, and the Python bindings.
The same architecture supports WLCG Tape REST operations and enables more direct Rucio and DIRAC integrations. We present the current implementation, compatibility boundaries, and remaining work.