Re: [RFC] gvfs connected servers

[Alexander Larsson <alexl redhat com>]

On Sun, 2008-10-05 at 19:56 -0400, David Zeuthen wrote:
> Hey Alex, Hey Matthias, Hey gvfs-list,
> 
> One of the the things we missed in Nautilus during the gnome-vfs ->
> gio/gvfs transition was the "Connected Servers" feature. Which I really
> miss; the current gtk+ bookmark feature is pretty much unusable for me
> for a number of reasons. So I spent some time this weekend implementing
> this feature in gvfs.

All right. Go davidz! /me strikes item from todo list.

>  3. It should be possible to have multiple "servers" that points to the
>     same server (think one for your home directory and one for a Movies
>     directory both on the same box). The implementation must support
>     changing all attributes (currently name, icon_name, uri) on the fly.

I agree on this. However...

> Fixing issue 3. is also needed for the gphoto2 backend to support
> multiple storage heads
> 
>  http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=520123

I don't think there is a need for this to solve that bug. It could
easily have two mounts for the same camera and still use only one
connection to it internally.

> To expand on issue 3., it's perfectly sensible to have
> 
>  GVolume
>   URI: ssh://quad.local/home/davidz
>   Name: Home Directory on quad
>   Icon: boring-work-icon
> 
>  GVolume
>   URI: ssh://quad.local/media/FusionMedia/Movies
>   Name: Movies
>   Icon: fancy-movie-icon
>  
> both pointing the same GMount (with mount root ssh://quad.local/). For
> the gphoto2 case the situation is this

I don't like this. Its sensible to have both these volumes. Yes.
However, I don't think its sensible to have different volumes pointing
to the same mount. Its really a weird setup that I think is gonna throw
a lot of people and cause problems. 

Now, I don't have a perfect solution already, but lets discuss the
possibilities here. The other approach would be to have different mounts
for these two volumes. However, we want to share the backing mount
(ssh://quad.local/) for them both, so this isn't ideal. 

What if we make the mounts for these volumes "virtual", pointing to
their ancestor mount instead? Kinda like symlink mounts? 

If we did that then to the above would be added a third GVolume, for the
root GMount (ssh://quad.local). I think that is sane, since otherwise
you wouldn't have anything anchoring that mount (i.e. no volume for the
root location on ssh://quad.local).

I haven't looked at the code yet, as I want to get the behaviour right
first.