Re: ftp and Nautilus

[Laszlo Kovacs <Laszlo Kovacs Sun COM>]

Hi All,

Calum was kind enough to put together a proposal for going ahead.

It is all here:

http://www.gnome.org/~calum/usability/specs/ftp-login/

This needs changes in gnome-vfs (I have some of this code already) and 
in gnome-keyring.

There are a couple of things to think about:

1. With dialog2 we are proposing that the user will see the 
authentication dialog coming back until they log in successfully or 
press cancel. This is different from what we have now. Right now if the 
authentication fails there is a warning dialog and that's it. The 
proposal provides a better user experience. I am not sure yet where this 
change needs to be made. It would be ideal if all vfs modules that 
require authentication would nehave like this, but I think every module 
would need to be changed separately for that.

2. We are also proposing to change the authentication dialog for the ftp 
protocol only, for other protocols it will stay as it is.

3. If the uri contained a username the username field in the 
authentication dialog (implemented in gnome-keyring) is not editable. I 
think the reasoning behind this is that if the user wants a different 
username or no username at all then they need to create a new launcher. 
This is quite inflexible in general and creates a complication for this 
situation as well. If we follow this thinking then if the user used 
anonymous for the username in the uri then the tickbox should be ticked 
in the dialog and the user should not be able to untick it. If we don't 
do this then we don't have a consistent behaviour, however having a tick 
box that can not be unticked is not good at all. Any suggestions 
(particularly from the gnome-keyring maintainer) are welcome. I 
personally think it might be good to make that username field always 
editable again.

Any thoughts about this?

Thanks,

Laszlo