Re: [gnome-network]downman description

[Manuel Clos <llanero eresmas net>]

Rodney Dawes wrote:
> > > Like many other download managers, 
> > > downman can manage different lists of downloads. This lists are called 
> > > Projects. When you first start downman you only have one project. In 
> > > Gnome Download Manager you can see this because it will show you no 
> > > tabs, this is, it will look like a simple list.
> >
> > this sounds like a good idea
>
>
> I don't like this idea, actually. It makes for a very complicated UI,
> and then you will need a complicated API to support it. "I have to
> create a /project/ to download a file?"

No. As I said in the description mail, when you start downmand for the 
first time ever it will create a default project, so you can start working.

Also:
	- You can't delete the last project from the GUI
	- If you manually remove the .downman dir (so this mean the default 
project), it will be recreated.

So there is not such complicated UI, just show tabs when you have more 
than one project. And there is no such complicated API to support it.

Downman has been written to be user friendly :)

> As emphetamine stands, it has absolutely no need to be able to do
> something like this where you would connect to either a local or remote
> backend. You simply just do the necessary stuff, and with the file
> chooser that it's using from libelysiumui, you can just browse to other
> machines, and use ssh, ftp, http, smb, or some similar method to just
> save the file to the other machine, rather than your own. I've tested
> it quite a bit by downloading most of ftp.gnu.org this way, and it
> worked great. The only problems came when gnome-vfs would trip over it's
> own feet.

Umh, it is not a matter of browsing other machines. You connect to the 
daemon running on another machine, so you should see what the daemon can 
see and not what your local user can see. This is one of the reasons I 
didn't started to implement it. I don't know if it is worth it.

> Right. We will need to handle multiple display cases though, so that
> we can have per-display daemons, so that everything works happily.

I don't agree here. I have a list of downloads. I want to see the *same* 
list of downloads no matter from where I'm logging as far as I login as 
the same user. Have I misunderstood you here?

> Currently emphetamine does this by default, but it doesn't seem like the
> best thing to have. Ideally we want to just have everything work with
> it, so that when you click a URL in epiphany or whatever, it just uses
> the manager we have in g-n. The main UI window will still accept drops,

Yes, it will be great.

> and the status icon can, while it's displayed, but I'd rather have the
> status icon be more or less shown only while something is being
> transferred. This will help lower the probability that the notification
> area will get cluttered by things shoving persistent icons in it, and it
> will still be useful while something is happening. Emphetamine is
> designed in such a way that it can do this, display the progress in the
> main window's list, or in a dialog similar to IE, provided I were to
> write the code for the dialog.

Yeah, the same is for downman.

> Emphetamine doesn't do this currently, but it has been planned for some
> time. I just have not had much time to do work on emphetamine and finish
> getting it ported to gnome2 and adding such features.

Wouldn't you switch to help if I do the gnome-vfs and bonobo stuff?

I'm currently working on downman, polishing it and adding features. So 
there is no problem doing the same work inside gnome-network.

> The UI is the trivial part, and most if not all download managers, have
> roughly the same UI.

I didn't think so. I have put lots of love and time in the UI. And I 
still need to switch from a list to a tree to be able to display the 
threads along the download. You also need some way to keep synchronized 
with the daemon without feeling sluggish.


--
Manuel Clos
llanero eresmas net
http://llanero.eresmas.net