Re: [Evolution-hackers] [Fwd: Re: Community Service]

[Garrett LeSage <garrett novell com>]

On Oct 28, 2005, at 10:45 AM, Dave Neary wrote:

> Web based file system interaction through gnome/apache.  Reach your
> files from anywhere via, gnome and apache.  Similar to publishing in
> evolution, but available for all(as much as you want) of your home
> directory through nautilus or a new application!


Dave,

There's really good news!  Your requested feature already exists, and  
it works wonderfully.  There's even a GUI frontend to add remote  
mounts in the standard menus.

Nautilus currently supports WebDAV, which is pretty much a Web based  
file system.  Apache has the capability of serving WebDAV (although  
it is a little bit of a pain to set up).

Thankfully, Nautilus also supports other means of getting to remote  
file systems, such as the typical SMB mounts and ssh/sftp support.

Using ssh or sftp (sftp is better, as it's actually made for stuff  
like this) is transparent for the user, once it is set up.  It  
requires the same information as it does to ssh to a host.

Tuomas Kuosmanen, Jakub Steiner, myself, and many others at work use  
the sftp support every day.

Your idea is exactly right -- it is very handy to be able to remotely  
manipulate files in the same way as you do with local files.

Also, since the capability to do all of this is actually provided by  
gnome-vfs, any application that fully supports gnome-vfs (far too  
few, actually) can even have full read-write access to files -- and  
the user simply treats it like it's on their own computer!

Thankfully, the Gimp can support gnome-vfs (at least from the CVS  
version), so Tuomas, Jakub, and myself all use it all the time, in  
addition to Nautilus.  We can drag and drop remote files from  
Nautilus on the Gimp and use its file selection dialogs to open and  
save files.

We do wish that more applications used gnome-vfs; perhaps there can  
be a push to have more software make use of it.

Garrett