Re: Mounting a path with GVFS

[David Zeuthen <david fubar dk>]

On Tue, 2008-10-14 at 13:26 -0300, Aldrin Martoq wrote:
> Hi! Sorry I don't know the internals of GNOME, so I posted in the wrong
> place and used wrong terminology.
> 
> On Tue, 2008-10-14 at 04:37 -0400, David Zeuthen wrote:
> [...]
> > Basically, the way I now think it's going to work this week, is that
> > you'll be able to create "server bookmarks", e.g.
> > 
> >  URI:   ftp://user some server:2121/tmp
> >  Name:  TMP on some.server
> >  Icon:  some-themed-icon
> >  Flags: show_on_desktop + show_in_places
> 
> Thanks a lot, this look exactly as what I want.

It might not end up working that way, as I said, this is still work in
progress.

>  Questions:
> 
> 1. Will the name of a mount appear as a path in $HOME/.gvfs/$NAME ??
> This is an important issue to me.

No it won't use the name of the bookmark. It's not possible with the way
things work (a single mount shared by several distinct user visible
objects). But, say, you can simply find the URI of the bookmark in
question and then use g_file_get_path() on the URI of the bookmark to
get the FUSE path.

Of course this depends on what your application is; you have not said
why it's important that the FUSE mount appears with the bookmark name so
So I'm guessing here.

(Usually, when asking questions, it's a good idea to describe what
problem you are attempting to solve; Because some times (and it happens
to all of us) there's a much simpler solution, I mean, who knows, maybe
you won't need a FUSE mount at all.)

> 2. Will this functionality be available in libgvfscommon/gvfs-mount ??

If we implement the way I'm thinking right now, it's just bookmarks;
there will probably be API in GIO (e.g. libgio) to manipulate bookmarks
plus probably a gio-bookmark (or gvfs-bookmark) command line tool to
list/add/remove/modify bookmarks.

> 3. I want to access GVFS functionality through DBUS, not libgvfscommon.
> Is this possible? I couldn't find any info about the dbus objects, so I
> had to look the code and reverse engineering using dbus-monitor ...

Keep in mind that GVfs is "only" an implementation detail of GIO. So in
a way you should think of GVfs as just a set of extensions to GIO (and
that's why there currently isn't any public GVfs API planned for end
user applications). So you want to use GIO instead. If you think GIO is
missing functionality it's worth asking about it (and telling what
problem you are trying to solve).

> 4. How can I help? I could implement one or more items of the above list
> for example, just need some little tips on starting developing for gnome
> the same way as you guys do (like: hey! download garnome and this is my
> git repository and this is the bug/issues site for this kind of
> development).

This page

 http://live.gnome.org/GnomeLove 

contains a lot of useful information on how to get involved with GNOME
development. The best way is to find a scratch to itch, ask the
developers of the component you're interested in (see the AUTHORS file)
on IRC / mailing list / Bugzilla and start writing code. Once you got
something that looks good, it's worth figuring out how to generate a
clean and nice (e.g. no white space noise, follow coding standards etc.
etc.) patch, or set of patches, so it's easy for the maintainer to
review and comment on. Then file a bug in Bugzilla.

For the feature in question (bookmarks / connected server), I'd suggest
to look at the thread I pointed to including the bugs mentioned in the
thread.

    David