Re: GLib plans for the next cycle

[Allin Cottrell <cottrell wfu edu>]

On Sun, 19 Apr 2009, David Zeuthen wrote:

> On Sun, 2009-04-19 at 20:05 -0400, Allin Cottrell wrote:
> > I've recently been trying to purge my GTK app of "deprecated"
> > stuff, and I tried replacing gnome_url_show() with
> > gtk_show_uri().  No go; on invoking gtk_show_uri() I get
> > "operation not supported".  After some googling, it appears
> > that one must have gvfs installed.  OK, I download, build and
> > install gvfs.  But it doesn't help.  Gvfs as built on my
> > system (without configure or compilation errors) apparently
> > can't handle URIs...
> >
> > This sort of thing is new, and IMO thoroughly obnoxious: up till
> > now, one could depend on GTK functions working provided one had
> > successfully installed the known stack of dependencies, which were
> > checked at compile time for GTK and friends.  Now we have GTK
> > functions that may or may not work depending on unspecified
> > dependencies...
>
> This is _supposed_ to work, there's already an unpleasant amount of work
> in GIO to ensure that things work when things like GVfs (which requires
> a modern flavor of Linux or UNIX) is not available.
>
> Now, GIO may not work as well as when GVfs installed (e.g. automounting
> storage devices won't work unless the OS actively assists with playing
> games like modifying /etc/fstab) but basics like launching a program for
> URIs _should_ work - e.g. http, mailto, file:///path/to/some.jpg file or
> other well-known URIs schemes.
>
> I could be wrong, but just briefly looking at the code it looks like
> there is no default implementation of GDesktopAppInfoLookup in GIO,
> there's only one in GVfs  (that looks up stuff in GConf under
> in /desktop/gnome/url-handlers/<scheme>) so it's no surprise things
> don't work if GVfs is not installed.

Yes, that's right.  As it's currently coded gtk_show_uri is bound
to fail if GVfs is not present.  But more than that: it'll fail
even if GVfs _is_ present (as it is now on my system), if GVfs
does not in turn incorporate GConf support.  I thought I'd read
that GConf was supposed to be deprecated, or on the way there?

> I think it would be reasonable if GIO at least handled file://
> and maybe also http:// and mailto:// (the former by using the
> MIME, the latter two by include a search path of well-known
> applications like epiphany firefox, evolution and thunderbird)
> and also the URI schemes used to launch Yelp.

Agreed.

> You should probably file a bug about this.

OK, will do.

Allin Cottrell