Re: Nautilus vs gnome-shell and the future

[Alexander Larsson <alexl redhat com>]

On Sun, 2009-12-06 at 01:45 +0100, Mark wrote:

> > I've seen nautilus as much more used as a kind of file activation
> > shell rather than a hardcore file manager, and when that changes the
> > rationale for spatial mode change too.
>
> Now this is interesting. I guess it was roughly 2 years ago that i
> proposed the exact same thing about browser mode. Back then it ended
> up in a huge flame war. Now you out of all people are proposing the
> same thing and suddenly you get positive responses and even gnome
> people that agree with it. Even a gnome person that proposes it! i
> must have been ahead of my time when i proposed it. More on this some
> lines down.

Interesting. You proposed gnome-shell as the replacement for nautilus as
the desktop shell two years ago? Got any links to that proposal?

> Now i didn't read every reply in this thread but i did saw the part to
> split nautilus from the file management part and the mount part. Also
> something i proposed a few years ago which was smashed down hard by a
> lot of people, you included, so i hope the following proposal isn't
> going to be smashed down since it's along the same lines just..
> different.

I don't think splitting out the automounting stuff has ever been
controversial. We're talking about a few hundred lines of code here. In
fact, its only recently that nautilus has started doing this, it was
done by gnome-volume-manager before.

> KDE did a smart thing with KDE 4. They had konqueror as there file
> management program but simply left it the way it was and made up
> Dolphin just to restart the file management from scratch and be clean
> again.
>
> I would propose to not touch nautilus! Make a new file manager just
> like KDE did for KDE 4. Make that file manager to __only__ manage the
> files! So you basically get a Dolphin only for Gnome. That way you can
> leave the people that want to use nautilus happy and people that want
> to use gnome-shall can use the new file manager (lets say: Sulituan
> which is nautilus in reverse).

KDE did this because konqueror was mainly a web browser. Nautilus is
already only for managing files basically. I don't understand which part
of nautilus you think are not for managing files.

> If you don't like this idea then at the very least make nautilus less
> tied with gnome. Split the desktop part, the mount part and probably
> some other part that i don't even know right now off of nautilus. Let
> nautilus do one thing: manage files. Not the desktop, not the mounts;
> only files!

What exactly do you mean by "mount part"? 

Its not really possible to split the "desktop part", its just a nautilus
window without menus or toolbar. It requires as much of the nautilus
codebase as any other nautilus window.


-- 
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
 Alexander Larsson                                            Red Hat, Inc 
       alexl redhat com            alexander larsson gmail com 
He's a jaded guitar-strumming werewolf with a robot buddy named Sparky. She's 
a high-kicking kleptomaniac angel with her own daytime radio talk show. They 
fight crime!