Re: Separate Download Manager From Epiphany

[Raphael Slinckx <raphael slinckx net>]

On Sun, 2005-11-13 at 01:18 +0100, Norman Jonas wrote:
> I absolutely agree. This would make it possible for several apps to
> share a single app for this particular task ( especially important due
> to the fact that a download manager often will still be required when
> the browser has been closed already ). Furthermore there are other apps
> which could utilize a download manager ( e.g. managing a big file
> download from nautilus when accessing an ftp site, drag drop a file uri
> from a text file - more cases I don't think of yet ).
> 

The same old problems with delegating downloads is that mozilla knows
about the history of a download request, such as cookies, http auth,
referrers, php sessions and whatnot.

If you simply pass the url to a third party program, it may or may not
work, and that's unacceptable in most cases.

There is such a manager called gwget which IIRC integrates in epiphany
but i don't think it handles the above mentioned problems.

What i once had working (and still must be working, just a little
outdated due to dbus api changes), is a download manager that just
exposes a dbus interface, and any downloader view can be used to show
the download progress.
That combined with more sources of long operations, and you have a kind
of framework to display long tasks running in the background, like
ripping CD's, fetching mails, or file transfers.
This project needs love, and unfortunately i can't fully concentrate on
it, and it requires a lot of PR to get accepted in the various affected
modules (nautilus, sound juicer, evolution, ephy, etc). A working
prototype is important in such cases..

> 
> > 
> > 1. If someone sends me an email with a link to a file, clicking that
> >  link in Evolution opens up a blank Epiphany window, and Epiphany then
> >  offers to download the file.  Separating the download manager would
> >  avoid the unnecessary step of opening an Epiphany window, which I just
> >  close.  Perhaps it would reduce the time for the download to start,
> >  too, if the download manager did not have to wait for Epiphany to
> >  load.  

The fact that ephy opens a window for a new download is a bug i think,
it should close itself if it starts downloading, i'm not sure if this is
just something that should be fixed, or something upstream..