gnome-user-share (was this really "Re: rfc: gnome-inetd")

[danilo gnome org (Danilo Šegan)]

Today at 16:32, Mike Hearn wrote:

> On Tue, 30 Nov 2004 21:06:50 -0500, Sean Middleditch wrote:
>> > (Man, it's hard to describe g-u-s accurately and concisely, without
>> > confusing it with things like Samba or NFS. Maybe "Web File Sharing"?)
>> 
>> "What do you mean, Jeff?  It uses WebNFS?"  ;-)
>
> There's a looming terminology/UI problem here w.r.t real world systems
> that exist on a Windows network. On most desktops there will be at
> least two different ways of sharing files:
>
> a) The GNOME (or hopefully, freedesktop.org/gnome+kde) way
> b) The Windows (Samba) way

WebDAV is supported on Windows as "Web Folders" I guess (I just saw
that on some random XP machine, I've never tried it). Technology
used in g-u-s for auto-discovery is "rendezvous" (or something),
which originated in Apple, right?

So, g-u-s is not "GNOME way", it's using protocols endorsed by others
as well (actually, defined by others).

I think gnome-user-share is a worthwhile addition to Gnome, but still
I hate the folder name "~/Public", and I want it to be "~/Дељене
датотеке" (just illustrating my point).

On that issue, since we waited this long, can we go with "extended
file attributes" in filesystem itself (xattr, supported by newer
ext2, ext3, XFS, there're patches for JFS, ReiserFS, ...) for
translations of the name?  That's something that's going to give best
results performance-wise, and scalability-wise.  That will allow us
to extend terminal programs as well to support translated names, but
that may cause major problems (i.e. directory "A" is translated as
"B" to some language, and there's another directory "B" in there
without translations; doing "cd B" should give you what?  this can be
solved by considering translations as "additional display names", but
not functional equivalents; note that this same problem may arise in
Nautilus with any method of display-only translation).

Are there any other negatives of this approach that I'm missing?  I
don't even know how widespread support for this is (my 2001 Slackware
system doesn't support them, but I'd be willing to upgrade for this
:).  We could even just put a requirement: "for translated folder
names, your filesystem must support extended attributes".  I, at
least, could live with that.

Cheers,
Danilo