State of gvfs in Gnome 2.21

[Alexander Larsson <alexl redhat com>]

As most people probably know by now I'm working on landing gio/gvfs in
Gnome 2.22 replacing gnome-vfs as the virtual filesystem.

At the moment I'm mostly working on fixing all the feature regressions
from the last release. We're in a pretty good shape with this, but there
are still a few regressions:

We currently have lack backends for ftp, obex-ftp, network:, dns-sd:,
fonts:, themes:. There is some action on obex-ftp, and I hope to be able
to finish network:, but the other ones are likely to be regressions in
the 2.22 release (unless someone else helps out).

Http/dav has seen some work, but is currently blocking on getting a
libsoup 2.4 release out.

Gio uses the new trash spec which stores trash in a different location
(e.g. ~/.Trash -> ~/.local/share/Trash/ for trash-in-homedir) and a
different format (we now have some metadata like original location for
the trashed files). However, we don't have a script to migrate the old
trash files to the new locations. We really should run something like
that on login so that you can see your old trashed files.

The configuration of what applications handle what uri scheme (mailto:
etc) is stored in GConf, and while we have an API in gio to access these
there is currently no implementation of it. I plan to implement this
using a module in gvfs, but long-term we might want to rething how this
is stored, especially with dconf comming in the future.

In gnome-vfs network shares are not "mounted" but just something you can
access via uris. In order to make them seems like mounts in the UI we
added something called "Connect to Server" in gnome-vfs which made a
network uri appear lika a "mount" in sidebars and places menus. Now with
gio we actually have network mounts which already appear in the same
places, so the connected servers are sort of unnecessary. So, in the gio
version connected servers are currently just ignored, and the UI for
setting them is removed.

However, connected servers are persistent, while gio network mounts are
not, so there is some use to them still. Maybe we should ressurect them
in form where they make it easy to mount a network location (similar to
the cdrom drive icons that let you easily mount a cdrom disc). This is
doable with some additions to GVolumeMonitor, but I probably won't have
time to look at this for Gnome 2.22.

One new thing in the gio-based nautilus is the handling of automounting
and autorunning. We've added a new concept of types for the contents of
mounted volumes like "x-content/blank-cd", "x-content/video-dvd",
"x-content/image-dcf", etc. Applications can list these in the mimetype
list in the desktop files to automatically appear in the autorun config
options in the nautilus preferences dialog.
Bug #510319 is the tracker bug for adding x-content support to our
apps.

There has been some changes in the API for nautilus extensions (removing
GnomeVFS types mainly). Some extensions have been ported to the new API,
some don't need porting, but there are also a few that need work.

These are the major regressions in the nautilus stack, but there are
also other uses of gnome-vfs in the desktop. Like the trash applet
(being worked on i believe) and the panel menus. I don't know the status
of these atm. Could people fill in the current status?