Re: SFTP Support

[Kai <kai willadsen gmail com>]

On 3 July 2010 08:49, Kristopher Ives <kristopher ives stoysnet com> wrote:
> I would be willing to add remote file system with GIO in a PPA version of
> meld. My employer requires this feature.

This would be fantastic. I haven't spent a whole lot of time thinking
about this, so I'm uncertain what can be done, and how easily. Meld
essentially consists of three, largely disjoint views: file
comparison, folder comparison, and VC view.

 - File comparison should be the easiest to port. It has relatively
little file handling, and what is there is fairly well contained.
However, we lose Python's universal newline support, and would have to
make sure that the replacement code deals appropriately.

 - Directory comparison is more involved in terms of the
file/directory handling functionality exercised. I haven't even
started to look at what would be required here.

 - In VC view, while the actual file handling should be easy, most
operations are carried out through external command-line VC tools. I'm
guessing that for these tools, we'll need to mount the filesystems
through GIO and pass the tools a local path.

Also, Meld is developed under git (and speaking only for myself, on
Fedora), so something like a gitorious/github repo would be more
useful than a PPA... but that's up to you.

cheers,
Kai