Re: GSOC: File Transfer Queue server/client

[Alexander Larsson <alexl redhat com>]

On Tue, 2009-03-24 at 14:33 +0100, Xavier Bestel wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> On Mon, 2009-03-23 at 14:46 -0700, Tad Fisher wrote:
> > Cross-posted from gnome-soc-list:
> > 
> > Hello, I'm a potential applicant looking for feedback on a project idea.
> > 
> > Basically, the plan is to develop a desktop-agnostic specification for
> > the queuing of file transfers, much as Nautilus does now on its own. The
> > spec will include details on specifying file sources and destinations,
> > both of which may be located on the local machine or a network resource;
> > adding/removing transfers from the queue; and running multiple transfers
> > concurrently.
> 
> What's the point of this ? Is it just to avoid two simultaneous copy
> from the same host/medium ?
> On an unrelated note, I don't think you can easily ask applications to
> abandon their way of copying files and centralize everything into one
> server (Nautilus won't get rid of GIO, Konqueror will keep KIO, and
> bittorrent clients need their highly tuned download engines).

Yeah, its not gonna happen. The nautilus file operations are very
complex things that implement core behaviour of the desktop file
operations. Putting this in some 3rd party app is not gonna happpen.

> But centralizing all those pesky progress dialogs is a very nice idea.
> How about reviving the http://live.gnome.org/Mathusalem project ?
> Basically do a protocol to export some progress tasks on D-Bus (file
> copy, mail download, etc: every I/O bound task which takes more than 3
> seconds to complete) and a nice UI on top, and plug that into each
> relevant GNOME app (Nautilus, Epiphany, Evolution, Empathy ...) and more
> (Firefox, KDE ...).

This I could see happening though.