Re: [Nautilus-list] nautilus and gnome-vfs

["Shahms E. King" <shahms shahms com>]

On Wed, 2002-03-06 at 20:33, Alex Larsson wrote:
> On 6 Mar 2002, Shahms E. King wrote:
> 
> > While reading the recent thread about .desktop file editing in Nautilus,
> > it occurred to me that the desktop itself should probably be a gnome-vfs
> > URI (desktop:/// anyone?) so I actually took the five minutes to add to
> > the libdesktop module in gnome-vfs (the appropriate change in nautilus
> > was similarly trivial), in fact the changes were so simple (and come
> > with so many other potential benefits, like, say administrator mandated
> > desktop items -- has some drawback, but I digress) without impacting
> > Nautilus' ability to "Use Home Directory as Desktop" that I figured I'd
> > ask why before submitting the appropriate patches ...
> 
> You mean why we haven't done this before? The libdesktop module is quite 
> new, and I just think we haven't thought of it yet.
> 
> How do you handle the "Use Home Directory as Desktop" preference though?
> 

well, similarly to how it's handled now, except rather than going from
"~/.gnome-desktop" to "~/" you're going from "desktop:" to "~/" 
that is, unfortunately, a Nautilus-only solution, the "correct" solution
is more difficult, and I'm not exactly sure of the best way to go about
it.  Ideally it would similar to the vfolder stuff (at least in spirit)
such that you could have multiple sources for the desktop, and the
desktop: module would know which sources to combine, and where to write
to, what to do when you "Delete" an item from the desktop you don't have
permissions to remove . . .

The question in that case is, of course, how to deal with configuration
of such a beast. It could (possibly) be made as simple as adding an
element to the vfolder spec to specify a directory to be merged using
using folders and files as such, rather than the categories in the
.desktop files.  I don't know how difficult that would be because I
haven't look at the libvfolder module at all, but it seems doable...


--Shahms