Re: Initial ideas on portals for file access

[Bastien Nocera <hadess hadess net>]

On Fri, 2015-03-13 at 13:07 +0000, Allan Day wrote:
> Alexander Larsson <alexl redhat com> wrote:
> > > I don't really like the word "silo" here.
> ...
> > True. Not sure of a better word. Application-local data?
>
> Yeah. Or application-specific, application-exclusive, application-
> owned...
>
> > > > Yeah, I'm not sure how to best solve that. One option is for 
> > > > pitivi
> > > to
> > > > have all files imported into the per-app data, like the app 
> > > > silo
> > > model.
> > > > That is kind of a large change though, and the video snippets
> > > imported
> > > > could easily be very large.
> > > ...
> > > > Maybe its good enough to say
> > > > that they'd have to be given full access to the Videos 
> > > > directory.
> > >
> > > Could some apps possibly have their own directory visible inside 
> > > $HOME?
> >
> > Each app gets a directory in ~/.var/app/$app-id/ where they can go 
> > wild. This is visible to the session and to non-sandboxed apps.
>
> Right, but it isn't visible to the user via the file browser. What 
> I'm suggesting (and it isn't a thoroughly thought out suggestion) is 
> that, say, Pitivi is able to create ~/Pitivi, where you could drop 
> video assets for use by the app.

This is what Cosimo's per-app XDG user dirs stuff did, except that the 
main purpose was sharing directories between similar applications.

Except that this probably wouldn't solve the Pitivi case, as it might 
need a soundtrack from application X, an image from application Y, and 
a video from application Z. Unless we moved those files around when 
sharing with the intent of moving those files (see the sharing + 
received receipt earlier in the discussion).