Re: Opening GtkDialog from gnome-shell

[Florian Müllner <fmuellner gnome org>]

On Tue, Mar 13, 2018 at 7:24 PM, segfault <segfault riseup net> wrote:
> In this design, to allow the user to specify keyfiles, there should a
> button in the ShellMountPasswordDialog, which opens a file chooser
> dialog when clicked. Unfortunately, I couldn't find any code in GNOME
> Shell which uses a file chooser dialog, and I wasn't able to open a
> GtkFileChooserDialog (or any other GtkWindow) in gnome-shell without
> causing gnome-shell to crash.

Yes, the window manager cannot open any windows that are handled by
the window manager. In the context of GTK+, that means that you can
only open GtkWindows of type GTK_WINDOW_POPUP from mutter/gnome-shell.
So as far as I can see, your options are delegating the file chooser
to an external process (like `zenity --file-selection`) or indeed
reimplement a file chooser in gnome-shell.

(A word of advise: I'm not very excited about the latter option, so
you will need very strong buy-in from the GNOME design team to
convince me to accept it)

Cheers,
Florian