Re: Proposal: gnome-user-share

[Sean Middleditch <elanthis awesomeplay com>]

On Wed, 2004-12-01 at 22:51 -0500, Brian Skahan wrote:
> On Wed, 01 Dec 2004 18:31:00 -0800, Ken Harris <ken bitpoetry com> wrote:
> > Also, if you have ~/Public/Drop Box/, there's an easy, standard place
> > for other people to give you stuff.  I know people who, if they saw
> > this, would say "a-ha! that's neat, I can use that", but if a drop-box
> > wasn't provided, they wouldn't realize that they could set up such a
> > folder, much less figure it out themselves.
> 
> Having a rw dropbox is an interesting idea.

Eh.  It's a nice start, but I think the model could be improved a lot in
future releases.  For example, with this dropbox, a remote user could
fill up your disk quota, drop "bad" things into your account (kiddie
porn, warez, etc) without you even knowing about it.

A better model, in my opinion, would be a system where when the user
attempts to upload the file, popup a dialog in the user's session
identifying the file, the remote user, and so on, and letting the local
user accept or deny the file and just pick somewhere to save it
(defaulting to ~/Downloads or whatever the cool folder of the week is).

I don't think is possible so long as Apache is used as the backend, but
with Epittance or a simple, lite, secure, extensible DAV server (one of
the bazillion things on the list of "stuff I want to do but probably
won't ever find the time or motivation for" ~_^ ) could probably handle
this.

Of course, while on the subject, it would also be nice if one *could*
force the remote users to identify themselves in some fashion.  It could
just be by requesting a password to access files (or to store them) or
somehow tie into the system auth (not something that should be done for
a daemon that runs as the user, of course) would be nice.  Hmm, Kerberos
and single sign-on.  ~_^

>  
> > (Note, I'm not saying that you shouldn't also be allowed to share other
> > folders.  I haven't actually made up my mind on that yet.  But even if
> > you do, making this automatic will help out lots of people who don't
> > want to muck around with per-folder sharing options.)
> 
> What about the vfolder shared:/// or public:/// idea, that way you
> could share multiple folders and still have a central place to check
> and say "oops, need to hide that one now".  It gets away from
> translatable on-disk names too.

*pulls out the axe and attacks the fake, custom protocols with wild
abandon*

> 
> -Brian
>