Re: Plans for gnome-vfs replacement

[Alexander Larsson <alexl redhat com>]

On Sun, 2006-09-24 at 22:49 -0400, Dan Winship wrote:
> 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.

Yeah, its not 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?

Thats already possible in thousands of ways. You can use different case
for hex escape, escape various sets of chars, add "/./" to the path,
etc, etc. Non-canonicalized URIs are very much not unique. Even
canonicalized ones can refer to the same object with for instance dns
aliasing or symlinks.

> 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.

That is be possible, but could end up being quite a bit more work,
especially if you want to handle authentication/mounting in the
gnome-vfs method. Another approach is to just use the old gnome-vfs and
rely on using the same form of URIs for the new vfs. 

> > 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.

Not all windows shell extensions map into real filesystem paths though.
For instance if you install bluetooth stuff that can browse your phone
in explorer that will be handled by a windows shell extensions.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
 Alexander Larsson                                            Red Hat, Inc 
                   alexl redhat com    alla lysator liu se 
He's an otherworldly small-town barbarian fleeing from a secret government 
programme. She's a brilliant African-American detective living on borrowed 
time. They fight crime!