Re: GSoC - Project Idea

[Sam Thursfield <ssssam gmail com>]

On Sun, Mar 21, 2010 at 8:11 PM, Salomon Sickert <sickert in tum de> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I'm a student aiming to get place in the GSoC program. While browsing
> http://live.gnome.org/SummerOfCode2009/Ideas and
> http://live.gnome.org/SummerOfCode2010/Ideas, I've got following idea:
>
> Nautilus, Epiphany, Empathy and other programs, which have the ability
> to transfer files, could expose the progress of the transfer. This
> enables other applications to react accordingly and allows to create
> an unified overview on the progress of file transfers.
>
> I've created a first more detailed draft, which can be viewed on
> http://home.in.tum.de/~sickert/file_transfer_progress
>
> Comments and discussion are appreciated.
>
> Greetings
>
> Salomon Sickert

Hi Simon
I think this is a good idea. There's a bit more prior art than you
have listed, hopefully it can make your life a bit easier

There was a project a while back to do exactly what you mentioned,
named Mathusalem. See http://live.gnome.org/Mathusalem .. I've not
heard anything about the project for years so I take it that it's
dead. Not sure if there's any code for it around, or if the originator
of the project is still around. I think it would be worth chasing it
up to see how far it got though, I'm sure I remember seeing
screenshots at some point.

Here's the other thing that might be helpful. Christian Hergert has a
library called Iris, which is really for multithreaded programming (a
bit like Twisted for Python apparently) and it basically lets you
schedule tasks to be run asynchronously. I added some stuff to it
which lets you set up processes, which are tasks that run on a queue
of items. This is relevant because I also wrote some code which
provides a progress monitor dialog for IrisTask and IrisProcess
objects in a fairly flexible way, using Iris' message passing.

If I was going to write your gsoc project, I'd build on top of this
work. IrisProgressMonitor is a generic class and it would be fairly
easy to write something that fires off the progress information over
DBus to your monitoring application. You could subclass IrisTask to
make a file transfer class, and a FileTransferProgressMonitor, etc
etc. (I did write the progress monitor stuff hoping that someone would
use it to do what you're proposing, although I'm far too lazy to do it
myself :)

If you're interested, my fork of Iris is here: http://github.com/ssssam/iris
I sent it to chergert a while ago and he's not merged it, I get the
impression he is pretty busy, but the library is very solidly coded
and easy to add stuff to.

Anyway, I'd like to think that this would be a good starting point
instead of building your own libprogress from scratch. I realise it's
nicer coding your own lib than someone else's however :) I hope this
stuff helps, let me know what you think.

Sam