[Nautilus-list] Re: magic desktop URIs

[Darin Adler <darin bentspoon com>]

On Tuesday, July 10, 2001, at 12:33  PM, Havoc Pennington wrote:

> In CVS I have the desktop-vfs-module directory. This contains two
> things at the moment:
>
>  - a cheesy desktop file parser, which I am using in Nautilus to
>    replace its current desktop handling code with something that works
>    on non-file: URIs; I think this will need to end up cut-and-pasted
>    into Nautilus for now, then eventually merged with or replaced by
>    whatever George cooks up for parsing these things
>
>  - a VFS module that simply maps magic URIs to trees of desktop files,
>    we have:
>
>       preferences:  /usr/share/control-center
>       programs:     /etc/X11/applnk + /usr/share/gnome/apps
>       sysconfig:    /etc/X11/sysconfig
>       serverconfig: /etc/X11/serverconfig
>       favorites:    ~/.gnome/apps
>       starthere:    /etc/X11/starthere

Are there issues with taking up so many URI schemes? What URI schemes do 
we own, and which ones need to be saved for uses that come from the W3C or 
elsewhere?

> The only issue with the Nautilus patch I think is how to deal with the 
> cheesy desktop parser code. I think just cut-and-pasting it into Nautilus 
> is right, probably no one else is going to use it in the immediate future 
> anyhow. I'll try to get this patch in acceptable shape and send it in 
> soon.

I think that's probably OK. A another approach would be to move it into 
eel.

> For the VFS module, does this make sense for gnome-vfs or should it be
> at a higher level?

I  think it's OK to have this module in gnome-vfs. I think it's a similar 
abstraction level to the MIME -> application/component mapping machinery 
that's already in gnome-vfs. But given the module architecture for 
gnome-vfs, there's no reason it can't go elsewhere if someone has a good 
suggestion.

> As an aside: when I write a new file into favorites:, Nautilus doesn't
> rescan the directory. I guess it can't figure out that a FAM message
> about ~/.gnome/apps relates to the favorites: URI. Is there a solution
> to this?

The "real" solution is to add a monitoring API to gnome-vfs, and move the 
FAM support from Nautilus to gnome-vfs. then the favorites module can 
implement favorites monitoring in whatever way is appropriate.

A short-term hack is to hard-code this same logic into the 
nautilus-monitor.c, adding a new call to nautilus-monitor.h that checks 
whether a particular kind of URI can be monitored, which would return TRUE 
for both file URIs and all the various types of magic URIs you are 
introducing. This is a step in the right direction; better than spreading 
around the assumption about what can be monitored into other Nautilus code.

    -- Darin