PolicyKit integration (#490200)

[stephane demurget free fr]

Hi Alex,

Obviously somebody would end up asking again about the PolKit  
integration, as in:
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=490200, so I'm stepping up for it :)

I read some (long) time ago your blog entry about a possible  
integration:  
http://blogs.gnome.org/alexl/2007/11/23/file-operations-in-nautilus-gio-and-adventures-in-the-land-of-policykit/
I saw a lot of users trying to use Nautilus -close friends, family,  
ppl from LUGs- to manage files on an external drive or even internal  
partition and suffering from wrong access rights. This usually leads  
to an incredible frustration.
Maybe this is mainly an end-distribution setup issue, something  
completely out of the scope for Nautilus or something that  
advanced/long time users think is completely ridiculus, but I really  
think this is the #1 issue of modern distributions for non IT-ppl.
I understood from your blog a simple, direct way to handle file  
management over the whole gio/gvfs stack, but I wonder if we could go  
one step further.
When users try to copy/move multiple files, they are usually getting  
really pissed when they are told at half the operation that some files  
could not be handled. Instead of escalating priviledges only when  
needed (keeping the priviledged helper in mind), do you think it would  
possible to guess out if the operation will succeed (excluding I/O and  
other issues) by applying simple file mode bits logic on all files  
before proceeding? It seems to be a problem with other OSes too. Maybe  
it would be nice for the helper to be able to bulk copy/moves the  
whole operation?
Do you think all those are possible and correct, or do you see an  
alternative implementation? You have the best experience with  
GIO/GVS/Nautilus, so I guess you could come up with the best  
implementation plan, seeing the whole picture ;)
Could you sketch down a couple of points of your ideal implementation,  
if it's not just a priviledged helper at the GFile level? Maybe you  
thought something different since the blog post about the user  
interaction already?
What tears me is that it might be distribution-specific issues and  
then I'd think of the PolKit integration as some sort of hack around  
that, which is IMHO  not the way forward then.
thanks,

PS: thanks for all your efforts to refactor and improve over the years, btw

--Stef