file sequences and plugins

[Simon Wistow <simon thegestalt org>]

I'm nto entirely sure if this is the right list to be posting to so 
apologies if I'm contibuting to any unwante demail problems.

I work at a film company and, at present, we have our own, crack fuelled 
and nasty file browser started years before I got here and I'm looking 
into replacing it with Nautilus.

We have two fairly specific requirements however. We deal with 
directories full of frames - anywhere between a few hundred and a few 
thousand but, most of the time, these are in sequence and we treat them 
as single object.

The other thing is that these files are usually within the context of a 
job, a shot and a scene. What job, shot and scene you're working in has 
implications to the rest of the system due to the fact that we use 
different versions of different programs like Maya depending on context.

My basic plan was to write a vfs layer that would fake presenting the 
files as a single object with a faked mime type so that we could write 
scripts that deal with them.

The other thing I'd like to do is the ability to right click on a
directory and have that set as the current scen (and/or shot and/or
job). I had vague naughty thoughts about faking up a mime-type using the
VFS layer but I'm not sure that would work - is there any clean way of
adding options to the context menu dependent on path withotu forking the
code base?

Nice to haves would include having a detailed file information panel 
(with possible lookups into our shot tracking DB) which I presume that I 
can just do with a side-bar. Also the ability for people to store app 
shortcuts on the browser but again I presume I can do that as a side 
panel if somebody hasn't already done it.

Thanks for the help,

Simon

-- 
i try not to let pedantry get in the way of a glib remark