Re: File sharing with Nautilus

[Bill Garrett <garrett memesis org>]

> Well, which web servers do you want to support? Only Apache?
> 
> Okay... first off, you're talking root access required on everything...

This is not necessarily the case for Web servers, but the alternative may not
be any more pleasant.  Assuming that "Share This File" in the context of
Nautilus means you wish to share only the file's content (as opposed to expose
the file as a CGI program), you can very easily include one of the MANY GPLed
"low-rent" mini-HTTP-servers out there.  Are any files being shared?  Start up
our mini-server, on some high port number, register its existence in GConf and
elsewhere, and inform it of the file(s) it should share.  Any others should be
automatically rejected, if requested by a client.

It can run with the permissions of the user, and either shut down when his
session ends, or keep running until he tells it to stop.  Ideally it
would watch when files move or are removed, and of course there'd be an
option to shut it down entirely, whether or not files were still being shared.

Obviously, this does not address SMB, NFS, and many other file-sharing
mechanisms.  It also raises the question of "is it the business of Nautilus to
be doing this?"