Re: libxdg-vfs and Gtk-Filechooser

[nf2 <nf2 scheinwelt at>]

Hi,

Sean Middleditch wrote:
> Making the GTK file chooser use libxdg is pretty shady.  Letting an
> application select a file on an FTP share is pointless if the application
> itself cannot actually access the file returned by the file chooser.  At
> best you'd have to have the chooser download/copy the file locally and
> return a temporary file path to the app.  But then changes to the file
> would be lost.  Saving the file would be difficult since when saving, the
> chooser just returns the URI to the app, which again has no way to write
> to any file that isn't local.
>   

http://www.scheinwelt.at/~norbertf/dadapt/files/xdg_utils/doc/libxdg-vfs.html 


libxdg-vfs supports get/put functions for reading and writing files - 
the application just has to link libxdg-vfs. The libxdg-vfs backend for 
GTKFileChooser wouldn't be the default, but just for applications which 
use libxdg-vfs .

> The xdg-vfs stuff is interesting, but until there is a complete library
> that can be easily integrated into applications, there's little point in
> having the file chooser support the xdg stuff.  And if you have GTK apps
> willing to use a VFS library, you might as well get them to go straight to
> the GObject-based gnome-vfs rather than xdg-vfs.
>   
AFAIK gnome-vfs doesn't use GObject in the API.

The advantage of libxdg-vfs is, that it uses the VFS system (password 
storage, protocol handlers, network shares) of the current desktop (KIO 
*or* Gnome-VFS). Therefore your GTK application will integrate nicely 
into KDE without directly linking to KIO (or the other way round - a Qt 
application on Gnome using Gnome-VFS).

Also - you don't have a whole desktop-system in the dependencies of your 
application - Just a little library. (If you want to use Gnome-VFS 
directly, you also have to link to libGnomeUI - same problem for KIO and 
the KDE desktop libraries).

cheers,
Norbert