Christian,
thank you for your explanations to me (earlier) and others.
One basic "problem" we (myself and some others) seem to have is -- as you mentioned: the 'philosophy' behind Apple's File Provider API is that data essentially lives in the Cloud and is only made available temporarily for working with it in macOS. My own scenario (and that of some others as I see from the posts in this thread) is kind of the opposite:
- data lives on my Mac (and is supposed to stay there)
- it is being copied (for backup and/or sync purposes) into some cloud.
Microsoft's OneDrive sync client made the transition to Apple's File provider API earlier this year (?), they, however, succeeded in making "download now" and "always keep local" work in their client, using File Provider API-functionality. If you guys were to implement that ("download now" is there but does not reliably and efficiently work in all cases, "always keep local" is not offered by BC 3.x, yet), most of us could use BC and continue working as before. (When saying so, I suspect that local copies continue to be available when the machine is offline and will be sync once online again -- this is of course a requirement for your sync logic, but definitely possible, since the new OneDrive client does work that way.)
Unless you "lock" BC or remove this Cloud provider in the BC config, you would then never lose local files (provded enough disk space is available, but those of us working this way will take care of that, obviously) and be able to work with them no matter whether you're online or offline.
-> This is description of what I understood from your earlier posts, Christian, Apple's tutorials on the File Provider API on WWDC, and the problem description of others in this thread. It does not address performance or other bugs, merely missing functionality. Correct me if I'm wrong... <-
