Re: Plans for gnome-vfs replacement

[Dan Winship <danw novell com>]

Alexander Larsson wrote:
> The only disadvantages I see [with IRIs] are:
> 
> 1) The mapping to FUSE filenames will be less intuitive

"Intuitive" is less important than "able to be figured out
programmatically", which shouldn't be a problem. Also, it will still be
intuitive in the case where the filesystem uses a single charset for all
filenames, right? If so, then this doesn't seem that bad.

> 2) We can't implement simple kio and gnome-vfs modules that
> automatically support all gvfs files. Instead we have to continue to
> rely on hoping %u being in the desktop file means all applications
> support the same type of URIs. (Which isn't true)

There might also be problems with IRI-based gvfs and URI-based gnome-vfs
wanting to using different URLs to refer to the same file?

For gnome-vfs though, we ought to be able to solve both problems if we
just accompany the gvfs release with an updated gnome-vfs that tries to
defer to gvfs wherever possible rather than using its own modules.

> 3) Windows doesn't use uris as its shell namespace, so we have to make
> up some sort of gtk-specific mapping from their identifiers to some
> custom uri scheme. We could just not support windows shell extensions,
> but it would be nice to access things like "My Documents" properly.

Is "My Documents" really needed anywhere other than in the file chooser?
If we still have multiple GtkFilesystem implementations, then
GtkFilesystemWin32 could handle translating Windows Shell extensions
into the corresponding real filesystem paths.

-- Dan