Re: use xml for modules.conf ?

[Christophe Fergeau <teuf users sourceforge net>]

Le lun 03/02/2003 à 16:14, Alexander Larsson a écrit :
> On 3 Feb 2003, Christophe Fergeau wrote:
> 
> > 
> > > 
> > > What were you gonna do with this information? Export it in an API?
> > > 
> > 
> > Yes, this info could be exposed to app writers with a simple API (eg
> > gnome_vfs_module_get_list and gnome_vfs_module_get_info or something
> > like that), this would allow apps (eg nautilus and a potential gnome-vfs
> > enabled filesel) to know which methods are available, to decide which
> > ones they are interested in, and to display these methods in a
> > user-friendly way (this would be better than the current "oh, I can
> > access to ssh servers using ssh:, I didn't know that"). The tricky part
> > might be to decide which info is necessary so that apps can do something
> > useful with it.
> 
> I'm not sure this is good. How would you express that information in a way 
> that a program could do anything useful with it (and work with all future 
> new vfs methods). Its probably better to just hack good support for e.g. 
> ssh: into the gnome environment, so its not as hidden.
> 
> List-uis generated from API "introspection" are rarely any good.


Yeah, it's of course possible to try to find a good way to expose ssh
and ftp in gnome so that users can use them easily, but in the case of
gnome-vfs, that's unfair for 3rd parties module developers: someone
writing a foo: module to browse files from a foo location won't be given
the opportunity of appearing in some place in the UI and its users will
have to know they should type foo: in nautilus to be able to use the
author's module.
Hence the idea of letting modules provide introspection info. But I
recognize I haven't tried to think about how they could be presented to
the user in nautilus for example, nor to think about which info would be
needed, and if it would be sufficient for all methods :(

Christophe