Progress report: Deployment and lockdown

["Sayamindu Dasgupta" <sayamindu gmail com>]

Hi,
Arrggghh - sorry for being so late. This shouldn't happen :-(
Actually I am in the beginning of one of the "high pressure" weeks in
college - this is the last week for submitting all our assignments and
reports.

Progress Report
============

Pre defined items in the desktop
-----------------------------------------------
My mentor (Three cheers for Federico!!) and I had some discussion over
IRC, and I came up with a proposal for Global Desktop Items in
Nautilus[1] based on a draft that Federico had written. The Nautilus
developers had some doubts about the plan[2], and my response[3] seems
to have satisfied their doubts[4].
Right now, I am trying to understand the Nautilus code, especially how
the Desktop is managed, and I'll be responding to the second list of
queries posted in the Nautilus list after I have some code to show :-)
I have also created some mockups of how the tool to configure
predefined items on the desktop will look like[5].

Restricted file system view
----------------------------------------
I have a preliminary specification ready (not public yet, since I want
to handle some of the issues in details).
The most difficult part in this specification is the issue of
removable devices - since we cannot pre assume anything on the mount
points, permissions, etc.
The plan is to leave removable devices to HAL (I have already spoked
with the HAL developers, and something known as PolicyKit is being
developed to control HAL policies - so that fits nicely into my
plans).
Now the issue is to make Nautilus, as well as the GTK+ filechooser to
stay clear of the removable device mount points. This can be done in a
number of ways, and I (along with help from Federico) am trying to
figure out the best way to do this. I am studying the HAL (and DBus)
specs. I faced some hurdles initially, since I have a habit of testing
out my code related ideas via Python, and Dbus-Python seems to have
changed a lot since the HAL spec was written. Now things are back on
track - and I have some Python code which listens for changes to the
system hardware and can figure out whether a device added to the
system is a removable device or not, and if so, what its mount point
is.


Feel free to ask questions and suggest stuff :-)

Thanks and have a nice day,
Sayamindu


[1] http://mail.gnome.org/archives/nautilus-list/2007-April/msg00045.html
[2] http://mail.gnome.org/archives/nautilus-list/2007-April/msg00050.html
[3] http://mail.gnome.org/archives/nautilus-list/2007-April/msg00082.html
[4] http://mail.gnome.org/archives/nautilus-list/2007-April/msg00084.html
[5] http://sayamindu.randomink.org/ramblings/2007/04/19/global-desktop-items-in-nautilus/

--
Sayamindu Dasgupta
[http://sayamindu.randomink.org/ramblings]