Re: adding new info to GnomeVFSFileInfo

["Shahms E. King" <shahms shahms com>]

On Fri, 2002-09-13 at 12:07, Ian McKellar wrote:
> On Thu, 2002-09-12 at 00:55, Christophe Fergeau wrote:
> > Hi,
> > 
> > Currently it seems that GnomeVFSFileInfo doesn't report some very useful information : whether an URI is readable, writeable or executable. 
> > This is quite annoying since, for example, this prevents gedit from being able to tell if it can edit a remote location or not. Nautilus has some code to try to handle that, but it probably will only work in the local case. 
> > 
> > What I'm suggesting is to report these permissions (ie the values returned by access(2) in the local case) in the GnomeVFSFileInfo struct. There we have 2 possibilities: add it to the permissions field, or use one of the padding pointers at the end of the struct to store them (not really a good idea to use one of those to only store 3 bits imo), and to add a new member to  GnomeVFSFileInfoFields to report if the information about the authorizations is there or not.
> > 
> > Does it seem sensible ? Did I miss something ? And more importantly, will a patch doing that be accepted or not ?
> 
> This is definately something we want. Nautilus has this idea in its
> NautilusFile objects so theres even some logic there we can base it off.
> Seth and I have discussed putting it into GnomeVFSFileInfo, I think Seth
> had some particular idea about how thought it should be done, as far as
> I'm concerned it can just be a bitfield added to the end with another
> flag in the flags field to indicate its validity. This makes *much* more
> sense for non-local filesystems (when uid/gid/perms makes no sense) and
> also answers the kind of questions that applications want to ask.
> 
> On a tangent we've discussed introducing other types of "capability"
> bits to complement the file-type concept. Right now a couple of things
> indicate to libgnomevfs and an application what sort of operations are
> valid on a given URI:
>   * whats the fileinfo->type?
>   * whats the fileinfo->mime_type?
>   * is there an entry in the method's GnomeVFSMethod struct?
>   * does the operation return GNOME_VFS_ERROR_NOT_SUPPORTED?
> None of these do a good job of describing URIs that don't follow the
> rules we expect of local files or directories. For WebDAV we ended up
> inventing a magic mime type: x-directory/webdav because we want to be
> able to treat WebDAV "collection" URIs as both HTML files and as a
> directory. If we could simply describe them through GnomeVFS as a
> resource of type text/html that support both directory operations and
> file operations I feel that would be better.

Just throwing my 2 cents in here: this would also solve my previous
question about chaining methods for archives and the like.  A .tar.gz
file could have it's typical mime-type but the same indicator as WebDAV
that it also supports directory operations and that would solve this
problem in the "proper" way.

--Shahms