[gnome-network]Re: network://

[Mark Finlay <sisob-lists tuxfamily org>]

> The whole network:// thing is a vfolder, with all the brokenness of the
> vfolder backend. I really don't like the way its currently done, so I
> try to minimize exposeage of it. We have to sit down and figure out a
> comprehensive strategy to mountpoints, removable media, things like
> non-usb-storage digital cameras and network filesystem resources. 

Yeah, we pretty much need a top-down design for all of that. But as well
as that we need to think about the implementation of it all. It really
is all stuff that should be done on freedesktop.org and implemented in
desktop-independent way. Some of it will be handled by the hardware
library being worked on, but some of it need to be thought about from
the ground up.

>  How do we make things like the ftp/dav
> backends usable (we don't want users to have to type in urls)? 

Well I assume that you mean you shouldn't have to type in ftp:// or
http:// because you really can't connect to a dav/ftp server without
typing in it's url at least once.

> What ends
> up on the desktop? in the multiroot tree? and in some sort of "My
> Computer" style location?

I think that local mounts should be on the desktop but network mounts
should be in a heirarchy under Network:// or whatever the equivalent is.

> So far this sort of user interface integration in Nautilus just hasn't
> been done. We do support a whole lot of things, but they just are not
> exposed in a way that a) make sense as a whole and b) is visible to a
> non-hacker.

Well to be honest a lot of the network backends aren't in a good enough
condition to be exposed even if we knew how to expose them. ftp and ssh
are fairly broken smb and nfs are not the best but hopefully XD2 patches
will sort them out a bit. Someone was blogging about fixing ssh: so I
hope we see some patches about that soon and ftp mostly needs support
for symbolic links. I think we can get it all in order by 2.6 :)

-- 
Mark Finlay 
Computer Science Student

E-Mail:	sisob_AT_tuxfamily_DOT_org
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 	http://advogato.org/person/sisob