[Nautilus-list] Plugins

[David Pettersson <dave se linux org>]

Hi all,

Been thinking a bit about the architecture of Nautilus. Remember that I
an a newcomer, so if I'm wrong, please correct me.

Anyway, what I have been thinking about are plugins. As it is now, most
of the nitfy functions are built in to Nautilus like the image viewer,
the music player, search engine etc.

Wouldn't it be better if Nautilus acted like a shell? Everything could
be plugins, and the default distribution would contain some basic
plugins for decent functionality (directory browser, image viewer etc).

What I propose is some sort of framework. There could be a plugin
manager, that calls the appropriate plugin based on the URI and
mime-type of the resource to be viewed.

The directory browser plugin would then be used for all URIs matching
file:// and match all file types *. There could be a image viewer plugin
that matches URIs * and mime-types image/png, image/jpeg etc. There
could be a Samba plugin that matches URIs on the form samba:// and
mime-types * etc.

I have no idea how this would work with Bonobo as it is used in Nautilus
today, or if it even is possible. Maybe these plugins should be Bonobo
components - I don't know.

Any comments?

Sincerely,
--
David Pettersson
dave se linux org