Re: Filesel dnd patch

[Darin Adler <darin bentspoon com>]

On Wednesday, August 29, 2001, at 01:32  PM, Alex Larsson wrote:

> Now, consider if you navigate to /etc in gmc, and then drag the "passwd"
> file and drop it on the fileselector. The uri passed here is
> file://a/etc/passwd, and the fileselector has two options. Either select
> /etc/passwd on the local machine (which is probably a different file), or
> bail out, saying that it was a non-local file.

You loaded the deck by choosing "/etc/passwd", a file that has the same 
location and meaning on every machine. There are a lot of files that don't 
have the same location on every machine.

Perhaps I'm too accustomed to systems where you can put files wherever you 
want. I guess that on Unix, the number of files that have the same path on 
every machine is large, making the behavior of opening a file with the 
same path on a different machine sometimes useful.

> But consider also if you navigate to $HOME in gmc, and drag a file from
> there to the fileselector. And furthermore, the two machines share the
> home directories using NFS (quite common in cases where you're using
> remote X apps). In this case bailing and refusing to handle the
> "non-local" file is bad, because even though the uri is non-local you can
> still access it.

But what about when the two machines don't share their home directories 
using NFS? And you have files in your home directory with the same name, 
but different contents, on the two machines. On example would be when I'm 
trying to edit two of my .cvsrc files on the two machines to reconcile 
differences between them.

Note that I asked if using the path and ignoring the hostname was OK. I 
didn't make a specific suggestion of what to do instead. Your suggestion 
of "bailing and refusing to handle the 'non-local' file" would not be my 
first choice.

    -- Darin