Re: Initial ideas on portals for file access

[Matthias Clasen <matthias clasen gmail com>]

Hey Alex,

thanks for writing this up! Overall the Open/Save api looks about as I
would expect. A few thoughts:

Your api is more or less focused on local files. But interesting
content these days very often resides elsewhere, in your various
online accounts.
https://wiki.gnome.org/Design/Whiteboards/ApplicationSandboxing
describes the operations as 'Content Selection' and 'Export' - do you
think that we should treat all of this under the Open()/Save() api ?
Your mention of a downloading step seems to hint in that direction.

Having an explicit Save() API seems to be a bit counter towards our
general trend of saying that state should always be persisted, to
avoid dataloss and to make applications stateless. I guess we assume
applications to persist their state in their 'playground' area and
only call Save() when the user wants to explicitly 'export' the
changes from the application ?