Re: 2.4 Proposed Modules - nautilus-cd-burner and gnome-vfs funkines s

[Alexander Larsson <alexl redhat com>]

On Fri, 2003-05-09 at 09:47, Murray Cumming Comneon com wrote:
> *** gnome-vfs schemes exposed to the user:
> 
> One big clue that something is wrong is that, when you click on the Write To
> CD toolbar button with nothing in burn:///. nautilus-cd-burner shows an
> error dialog saying "You need to copy the files you want to write to CD to
> the burn:/// location." If we can't think of something better to call it
> than "the burn:/// location" then we have probably got something
> fundamentally wrong.
> 
> I don't think anyone really talked/agreed about the various
> applications:///, preferences:///, system-settings/// stuff before adding
> them. I'd like to think we can do without some of them in future and hide
> the rest as gnome-vfs programmer details. Where we do use them we need to
> give the user a better visual cue that he is in a special location.
> Otherwise we maybe need to prevent users from hiding the Nautilus location
> toolbar, and I don't think people will like that.
> 
> By the way, I find the special control panel, fonts, printers,
> dialup-connections, etc, special file manager locations in Windows strange
> too, but at least they all seem to be _under_ the "Control Panel" path.

I agree that exposing uris to users are bad. I think the solution to
this is to hide them from the location bar in nautilus. This needs some
work in nautilus, basically the location bar has to behave a bit like
the To: entry in evolution, if we need to rewrite part of an url (the
burn:// bit) it should turn into an "object" that you can't modify parts
of. 

This is on my todo list, but as always, there are lots of stuff there.

> *** Possible alternatives:
> 
> Why can't we use a standard folder in the home directory for this instead of
> a special gnome-vfs scheme? It might feel more comfortable than opening a
> nautilus window that I won't use, just so I can see the Go menu, so I can
> choose the "CD Creator" menu item.

That would 100% tie n-c-b to magicdev though, which many people don't
run, and isn't all that portable. And I think this limitation is pretty
bogus, it forces the user to start everything by physically putting in a
blank cd.

> I would be slightly happier if burn:/// was just what you saw when viewing a
> blank CD in a CD-burner drive, and if that was not available in any other
> way. That wouldn't allow people to create .iso with nautilus-cd-burner, but
> I think it's OK to leave all but the most-obvious functionality to
> specialized CD-burning apps.

I don't see what is so hacky about it. Ok, it exposes uris to users
which is crack, but n-c-b isn't the only thing that does that. Its a
problem we have to solve anyway.

Otherwise n-c-b is all about managing and virtualizing files, and the
way we do that in the gnome platform is to use gnome-vfs. Its much less
cracky than some other usages of gnome-vfs (themes:? printers:?) in that
it actually handles real files, and has normal file semantics.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
 Alexander Larsson                                            Red Hat, Inc 
                   alexl redhat com    alla lysator liu se 
He's an oversexed one-eyed stage actor fleeing from a secret government 
programme. She's a time-travelling insomniac journalist who believes she is 
the reincarnation of an ancient Egyptian queen. They fight crime!