Re: VFS for legacy apps (was: gvfs status report)

[Alexander Larsson <alexl redhat com>]

On Thu, 2007-02-22 at 03:10 -0600, Hans Petter Jansson wrote:

> This won't work. We need to be able to extract all the mount information
> from the path, so that if the app stores the path across sessions, say,
> in "recent documents", the FUSE layer will know what to do when it's
> accessed later.

I'm just not certain this is true. I mean, we already have this problem
with say filenames pointing to unmounted NFS shares, or to removable
media. Is this a huge problem? You'll just get an error that the file is
not there, go "ah, yeah", click on the icon to mount the share and try
again.

> Most URIs also look like total ass. It depends on what you're used to.
> And ass or not, being able to access a document on a remote share when
> it's launched with or dragged to a legacy app trumps it. I'm sure
> users of e.g. MPlayer or Acroread would thank us. There are also
> plenty of GNOME apps that never worked with non-local files :)

In almost all cases where mplayer or acroread were involved things would
work perfectly fine, as you're using a desktop to start said files, so
the shares were already mounted. If the file was availible to the user
to open, click on, dnd, cut'n'paste, etc then the filesystem is mounted,
and there will be no problem. The only case where things get problematic
is if a filename was stored in a config file (recent files being the
typcial example), and the file is on a share that is not normally
mounted in your day-to-day workflow.

Also, you're saying that if we can't automount on pathname access then
its not useful. However, this can lead to all sorts of problems because
the mount operation can do things like open authentication dialogs. Such
stateless behaviour is causing problems in gnome-vfs and is what we're
trying to move from. For instance, the authentication dialogs will never
have the right transient-to information and can easily get lost
(especially if the app has a modal dialog up). And during the
authentication the application will likely be blocked, not even
redrawing its UI, which will look very broken.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
 Alexander Larsson                                            Red Hat, Inc 
                   alexl redhat com    alla lysator liu se 
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