Extending dns-sd

["WareKala `" <warekala hotmail com>]

I don't know if this is the correct place or will I piss people off like 
this, but this is anyway where I was told to ask my questions..So, what I 
had in mind is making dns-sd a bit more useful in nautilus. I don't actually 
know if this should be in gnome-vfs or somewhere else, but yesterday I was 
playing around getting howl working. Finally I saw sftp-ssh in network:// 
with Nautilus, but I was a bit surprised there were no other services 
showing up, even though I did publish nfs, http, vnc etc. Even plain ssh 
didn't show up, only sftp-ssh. So, I came to thinking that why not let 
programs "assign" themselves to certain services? So for example if Gaim 
also supported howl, gaim would publish a service like msn along with the 
used alias and account info. Now on another computer I'd install Gaim, it 
would register itself with msn.tcp, and thereafter Nautilus would show up a 
nice MSN icon whenever the other person was logged in, and doubleclicking 
that icon would do whatever Gaim was assigned to do, f.ex. send an IM to 
that person. I have a picture to better explain what I had in mind in: 
http://kinuski.ath.cx:2048/dnssd.png

This approach would make it alot more practical and would allow for more 
interesting stuff, too. I've been sketching an idea of something I call 
SimpleShare. Short put not everyone needs all the functionality of samba, 
NFS needs root access and so forth, so why not run a sharing daemon in 
user-space? SimpleShare-daemon would just use some arbitrary port number, 
whichever was open, and would publish the shared files and folders via howl, 
along with the info as to who shared them. This way it would even be 
possible for multiple users simultaneously sharing stuff on the same 
computer, everyone would just have a port of their own. Now, Nautilus would 
then come in picture when browsing network://. If there was a handler 
assigned to SimpleShare.tcp, Nautilus would show all those shares where 
users would expect to find them, and without problems in connecting to each 
and every one of them.

I would have done something myself, but I don't have the necessary skills, 
so that's why I decided to propose the idea here.
-WareKala

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