Re: [Nautilus-list] Plugins

[Darin Adler <darin bentspoon com>]

On Friday, August 10, 2001, at 07:30  AM, David Pettersson wrote:

> 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.

Not really. The image viewer and music player are separate Bonobo 
components. They are included in the Nautilus package, but they are 
actually separate executables.

> 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).

That's exactly how Nautilus works.

> 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.

Yes, that's right. That's how Nautilus works.

> 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.

Again, you've hit on how Nautilus already works.

> Any comments?

Now that you know Nautilus already works exactly the way you are asking 
for, what are you going to do next?

    -- Darin