About
FUSE stands for Filesystem in USErspace, a mechanism to allow unprivileged user to mount different filesystems w/o hitting kernel too much. See its homepage and dedicated page on Wikipedia.
Status
Fedora ships with FUSE since FC-4. It consists from the in-kernel module, the main package, called fuse, the fuse-devel subpackage (intended only for developers) and fuse-libs package. The split of package into fuse and fuse-libs was made due to different licensing schemes - fuse-libs licensed under LGPLv2+ while fuse licensed under GPL+.
RHEL provides in-kernel FUSE module since version 5.4.
Available filesystems
The number of FUSE-based filesystems, available in Fedora, steadily grows. Currently ( Sat Sep 5 19:05:24 MSD 2009 ) available the following filesystems:
afuse
curlftpfs
davfs2
encfs
funionfs
fuse-afp
fuse-convmvfs
fuse-gmailfs
fuse-s3fs
fuse-smb
fuse-zip
fusecompress
fuseiso
glusterfs-client
gvfs-fuse
ifuse
ltspfs
ntfs-3g
obexfs
sshfs
wdfs
Also, the following language bindings were providing:
Packaging rules
Due to splitting the main package into fuse and fuse-libs, every filesystem, based on FUSE, must explicitly add the following:
Requires: fuse
to the head of its spec-file.