Re: Do FileChooser+gnome-vfs currently work?

[James Henstridge <james daa com au>]

On 23/03/2004 4:43 PM, Luca Ferretti wrote:

> > These properties are object properties as opposed to style properties.  
> > Putting them in your gtkrc file will have no effect. 
> >    
>
> I don't understand.
>
> Example: I want that all my file chooser dialogs show hidden files; I
> know that this feature is driven by the 'show_hidden' properties of the
> widget; I belive that this widget property can be changed as well as the
> 'has-secondary-backward-stepper' for GtkScrollbar, via gtkrc.
>
> Where am I wrong? Why?
>  
There are two types of properties for a widget: object properties and 
style properties.  Object properties are things that an application 
author sets (either directly through code, or set in a glade 
interface).  In contrast, style properties control aspects of how a 
widget looks that a theme might want to change (such as the frequency at 
which the cursor flashes in an entry field, placement of buttons on a 
scrollbar, etc).  Style properties are set in the gtkrc file, usually by 
the theme author.

Now a property like "local-only" is definitely not a property of the 
theme, since it controls the behaviour of the widget.  Do you think it 
sensible that some app that can't open smb:// URLs should behave buggily 
with some themes and not others?

The "show-hidden" property is another one that doesn't really sound like 
something a theme should be setting.  At the same time, it doesn't sound 
like the sort of thing I would want individual apps deciding on.  
Ideally the value of "show-hidden" would mirror the equivalent setting 
in Nautilus.  It doesn't appear that it does right now though.

> > An application has 
> > to explicitly state that it can support non-local files.  If it doesn't, 
> > then the file selector will only let the user select local files.
> >    
[snip]

> So, the starting question again.
> The /desktop/gnome/interface/file_chooser_backend key value is
> "gnome-vfs" but all file chooser dialogs still use the "gtk+". Why?
>  
GTK watches an XSETTINGS property to find out what file system backend 
to use.  If everything is working correctly, gnome-settings-daemon 
should be exporting the value of that gconf key via XSETTINGS and things 
should just work.  Maybe your gnome-control-center isn't up to date, or 
you haven't logged out and back in again since the code was added.  Very 
few applications would need to set that property manually.

> > The reason that the default is local-only=True is that the failure mode 
> > is less severe.
> >
> > If an app supports openning remote files but local-only=True, then the 
> > app still works (but some of its functionality is hidden).  If an app 
> > only supports local files but local-only=False then the user can select 
> > files to open that the app can't handle, which is much worse.
> >    
>
> As user, IMHO this is a not so smart behavior. Are you really saying
> that remote/virtual fs support should be maneged via filechooser backend
> AND application ???
>  
that is exactly what I'm saying.

> So, when GIMP will switch to GtkFileChooser, I will not have the
> ability, for example, to save an image on a ftp server if gimp
> developers don't set to false local_only property?
>  
Yep.  Given that Gimp doesn't currently contain code to save files to 
FTP servers (it doesn't use gnome-vfs), what do you think it should do 
if the file chooser returns an FTP URI as the target to save to.

If/when Gimp implements gnome-vfs (which would be a fair bit of work), 
they can simply set local-only=False and the file selector will allow 
users to pick remote locations.

> I'm not saying that local_only is a bad property, it can be great to
> prevent users to access remote stuff, but I think that its default value
> should be false and it should be true only if you want to deny remote
> accesses (at application or whole desktop level).
>  
The problem with this is that the baseline file access routines on POSIX 
systems _are_ local only, so it makes sense to choose a default that 
doesn't result in a large number of broken applications.

Remember that all these details should be invisible to users.  If 
gnome-settings-daemon isn't setting the file system backend correctly, 
file a bug report (when bugzilla starts working again).  If an app that 
supports openning/saving to remote locations hasn't set 
local-only=False, report a bug against the application.

James.

--
Email: james daa com au
WWW:   http://www.daa.com.au/~james/