Asynchronous FileChooser -- Progress

[Kristian Rietveld <kris imendio com>]

Hello All,

Just in time for Christmas, I managed to complete a basic implementation of
the changes to the GtkFileSystem API as discussed earlier on this mailing list.
This basic implementation contains the modification of the GtkFileSystem API
and adapting the file system back ends and the various widgets to this new
asynchronous interface.

I think it would be really nice to have this included with the GTK+ 2.10
release.  To ensure that this modified FileChooser code gets proper testing
before the GTK+ 2.10 release, I would suggest that this is a good time to
start reviewing the change set and merge them onto the HEAD branch.  We can
continue bug fixing from there, and hopefully it will get some proper testing.

The GTK+ part of the change set is located in the "kris-async-branch" of gtk+,
also the GNOME-VFS backend got ported and is located in the
"kris-asynch-branch" of libgnomeui.  The latest code will of course always be in
CVS, I also put online diffs containing the changes between the branch point
and today:
  http://people.imendio.com/~kris/gtk-file-chooser-change-set-23Dec05.diff
  http://people.imendio.com/~kris/libgnomeui-file-chooser-change-set-23Dec05.diff

Of course the implementation has not been fully finished yet, so there are
some issues still pending:
 - autotestfilechooser has not yet been updated.
 - The win32 backend has not been ported.
 - gnome-vfs does not have an asynchronous call to create new directories.
 - The gnome-vfs backend does parse .desktop files (using a copy of
   GnomeDeskopItem), but GnomeDesktopItem currently operates synchronously.
   If this poses to be a problem, we should look into making GnomeDesktopItem
   operate asynchronously, or write a replacement which better suits the
   gnome-vfs backend.
 - The gnome-vfs backend should be installed in a new versioned directory.
 - API docs will be updated/written soon.
 - There might be bugs.


regards,

-kris.