Re: GIO style remote URIs support

[Kai Willadsen <kai willadsen gmail com>]

On 18 July 2015 at 18:45, Märt Põder <tramm p6drad-teel net> wrote:
> It seems to me that Meld 3.12.3 for some reason happens to support URIs like:
>
> sftp://user server:port/path
>
> I presume it's not protocol specific (I also tried plain FTP and it seemed to work too).
<snip>
> It'd be good if we can figure out, why are these URIs enabled and what does enable it. And I get my version 
> number which I can use for packaging the feature requested for Nautilus Compare (of course, I could just 
> test it in the wild and come up with some estimation).

So my best guess is... Meld doesn't support this at all, and gio/gvfs
(or something) is magically mounting it as a local filesystem and
giving us a path. I'm pretty confident that *something* like this must
be happening, purely because I'm currently in the (very very slow)
process of trying to move Meld's file handling from using Python's
file-only APIs to using GIO for file access.

As for why it happens to work on newer versions, I really couldn't
say. It could be the GnomeVFS support removal that that bug report
points to, or... something else entirely. There have been several
changes to command-line argument parsing (including in 3.13) which
could also affect the behaviour. The bottom line is that it's not
officially supported yet, and I'm surprised whenever I hear that it
apparently kind-of works.

cheers,
Kai