RFC for a better Network place.

[Sebastien Estienne <sebastien estienne gmail com>]

Hello,

I'd like feedback about speeding up network place browsing, and adding
functionality to offer a more consistant and faster experience in
network browsing.

first problem:
 it's always slow to display the first entry when you launch network
place, it starts empty and you have to wait 4/5 seconds before seeing
anything
even if you have just browsed the network 10 seconds ago, maybe it would
needs some kind of caching to offer a better experience to users.

I was thinking about implementing this functionality in a deamon. The
deamon would periodically browse the network (could also browse for
zeroconf services). And exports it's findings throught dbus.

In this schema "network place" would talk to the deamon using dbus,
and the browsing would answer immediately.

second problem:
the display feel unconsistant: you have workgroup, computers, shares,
ssh share, nfs and so on. All at the same level without any logic in
there placement.
Maybe we could sort them a bit.
Maybe separating windows/samba browsing from other shares.

it seems to be 3 types of network ressources:
- samba/windows : windows workstation, workgroups samba shares:
- zeroconf detected services: webdav/ftp
- user defined shares : dav/ftp/nfs/ssh

Maybe we should try thinking of a "better" way to organize them?
Maybe a simple separation would be enought, or maybe we could separate
"browsing" from "favorites" places. I don't have a perfect solution
for the moment, but i'm sure it needs some works! :D

I'd like to have the opinion of other nautilus hackers :)

-- 
Sebastien Estienne