Re: Plans for gnome-vfs replacement

[Alexander Larsson <alexl redhat com>]

On Wed, 2006-09-20 at 10:43 +0200, Paolo Borelli wrote:
> Il giorno lun, 18/09/2006 alle 18.12 +0200, Alexander Larsson ha
> scritto:
> > I'd like to propose using a stateful model, where you have to
> > explicitly initiate a session ("mount" a share) before you can start
> > accessing files. This will give a well specified time when all forms
> > of authentication will happen, when applications expect it and when
> > they can use a more expressive and suitable API for this kind of
> > operation. The actual i/o operations will then never cause any sort of
> > authentication issues, and can thus be purely non-graphical
> > (i.e. glib-only apps can do i/o). I imagine all/most actual mounting
> > of shares will happen in the file manager and the file selector, or at
> > gnome-session startup, so applications don't really need to handle
> > this themselves.
> > 
> 
> I was talking with Paolo about this and we were a bit concerned about
> the above paragraph... How it would work for the case where I simply
> want to drag an URI from firefox to gedit to open the file[1]?

We could have an api that lets you map a URI into a vfs object with a
more complicated API that lets the application have a dialog with the
user requesting things like authentication and prefered filename
encoding for the share (essentially a mount operation based on a uri).
We would need to use something like that anyway in the file selector,
because it would need to be able to mount things as you input locations.

On the other hand, exposing URIs like that in the API will be tricky for
other implementations of the vfs. For instance, on windows we probably
wouldn't be using the gnome implementation of the vfs, but rather
something using the native vfs, including the built in smb support, etc.
And win32 doesn't use URIs for this.

One approach could be to have backend specific APIs one could use for
this.

How would you like it to work? I can't believe you actually like the
current way this work, with authentication callbacks, etc.

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 Alexander Larsson                                            Red Hat, Inc 
                   alexl redhat com    alla lysator liu se 
He's a hate-fuelled misogynist librarian from the Mississippi delta. She's an 
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