Re: Volume handling proposal

[Rodrigo Moya <rodrigo gnome-db org>]

On Tue, 2003-09-16 at 15:40, Alexander Larsson wrote:
> Network mounts are typically used in two ways:
> The most common one is when a person is working in a group or a
> project and they share some server where they store their files, or
> you work alone but often use a particular storage server. In this
> case you typically get told exactly what share to use, and you never
> really use any other shares.
> The less common case is in more ad-hoc style network such as
> university dorms where lots of people have machines set up and you
> want to browse them all looking for some file. Once you've found the
> file you typically aren't interested in that server anymore.
> 
That is a reason for having an easy way for users to navigate the
network, easily accessible from their normal navigation program.

Also, what about network mounts that are mounted at system boot time? In
some cases, those are shared storages, so it makes a lot of sense to
have an icon/toolbar/whatever to easily access them. But, in other
cases, like NFS-mounted homes, it doesnt make too much sense to do so, I
guess. So, I think there should be an easy way to know which kind of
network mounts each one is.

> 
> Second one is the MacOS X concept of connected network
> volumes. You select "Connect to server" in a menu, and then using
> either manual typing or a browser for some types of servers you select
> a server and directory. This location is then saved between sessions
> and easily accessible. This allows you to quickly access commonly used
> shares, and is also a way to introduce a way to intelligently handle
> non-discoverable network shares. At the very least you only have to
> figure out/get told that strange ssh: uri once.
> 
With a little bit of work in the nautius-add-server tool, we could have
this in network://. The problem I see with the current network: view is
its simplicity, since the only way to access a network volume is by
knowing in advance its name+path.

> Third one is the "Network" location. Ideally this contains all the
> servers in the current windows workgroup, all zeroconf webdav servers
> on the local net and all other discoverable network shares. It also
> contains a "Windows Network" icon linking to smb://.
>
hmm, you mean having all discovered servers, regardless of the protocol
in the Network's root view? If so, that sounds really nice, and I guess
would help a lot users, since they just dont need to know which
protocols are used.

>  Windows XP does
> this a little bit different, they list every share on every server in
> the workgroup as "<share> on <server>". There might be quite a lot of
> these though, and querying for them requires you contact each
> computer, so this is probably not a good idea.
> 
I think it's much cleaner to show the server names, and when clicked,
show the shares for the selected server.

> I'm not sure what roots we want in the fileselector. At the minimum we
> want the desktop ones, but do we want e.g. unmounted floppies/CDs there?
> 
I'd vote yes

> 
> "Network" is a bit hard, since it has to be a combination of data from
> various vfs backends. It needs some thinking, but I think its implementable.
> 
are you thinking on a gnome-vfs module for this? Or a view as it is now?
I am looking forward to implement this.

> Still not sure what roots make sense in the file selector. Do we want
> to allow mounting of e.g. floppies from the file selector?
> 
yes :-) I never use floppies, but I know people who use them a lot to
exchange files, still. So an easy way for them to just open the docs
from the app they are using is a nice idea.

cheers