Re: Regarding Nautilus scripts

[Dave Camp <dave ximian com>]

On Sat, 2003-06-07 at 23:12, Eugenia Loli-Queru wrote:

> There is an interesting issue here with your strategy: You prefer to keep
> scripts around because "some" user will need it to write a _very_
> specific/custom bash script for his own and only own purposes and this will
> probably will please what? 1% of the nautilus users? (and chances are that
> such a user knows some C anyway and probably can create the same script
> without the need of Nautilus)

We keep scripts around because we think they are useful to a certain
percentage of our users.  Not everyone that can write a shell script can
necessarily write nautilus code, and more importantly they don't *want*
to.  Throwing together a nautilus script is much easier than writing
nautilus code.

> And you don't want to make the jump to create an addon API that will help
> _everyone_ who uses nautilus by having 4-5 default extremely useful addons
> there, and I can think of at least 10 more that I would personally find also
> useful for everyone.

We do have an "addon api".  Context menus can be added using bonobo
objects.  They currently show up in the toplevel context menu.  They can
be written in any language with bonobo support, which includes C and
python among other things (the boilerplate for python code is around 10
lines of code and twenty or so lines of .server file).

Any extensions shipped with gnome should probably use this API (and a
few, such as Archive Files already are)

> There is another issue here, even bigger: The Nautilus developers have not
> even found a single script that is worth shipping. It is like saying "well,
> we implemented the script thingie, but we don't know what it would be useful
> for, so we won't ship a sample with it, if the user wants to do somethng
> with it, great, if not, great as well". For me, this is terrible thinking.
> As a user, when I see an EMPTY menu all the time, never filled up with any
> options, is just a reduntant menu. It is just wrong.


> If you don't wanna hear me out about an addons api, at least please do
> something about the existing scripts menu. Either take it out or ship some
> scripts with it. The way it is now, it is just unacceptable and
> unprofessional IMHO.

One plan we've been kicking around is to hide the scripts menu if you
don't have any scripts defined.  This will reduce its discoverability
even more, but will prevent it from getting in the way of people that
don't care about it.

> > I never would have bothered making a mime-type for the terminal
> > if we had shipped a script to do it. another example
> >is if we implemented a script to run things as root we
> > might never implement a proper authentication infrastructure.
> 
> Then I am sorry to say this, but this sounds like problematic management of
> the project rather than an addon issue in itself.
> Personally, I don't believe it will create a problem.

There were a number of scripts on g-scripts.sf.net that were clearly
workarounds for bigger problems in gnome.  We need to solve the problems
there, not the symptoms.

-dave