Re: "Add drive" designs

[Allan Day <allanpday gmail com>]

Ross Lagerwall <rosslagerwall gmail com> wrote:
...
> >  1. Is it possible to discover servers on the network, in order to
> > present them in a list? Are there scenarios where this wouldn't work
> > for UX reasons (say, in environments where there are a lot of
> > servers)?
>
> This is going to be tricky.  At the moment, network:/// shows
> avahi-published services (e.g. afp, sftp, ftp) and windows servers.
> Some of them may be directly mountable (equivalent to a "drive"), others
> may be a server that needs to be logged into before you can even see
> what "drives" are available to mount. The windows section can show
> multiple different workgroups/domains, each with tens of servers, each
> with several shares. I'd imagine this to be common on an office network.
> Presenting this as some sort of tree may be possible, although I'm not
> sure if it's any better than the existing implementation, which is just
> a filesystem tree.
>
> From a technical perspective, enumerating all the windows share to show
> in the Connect dialog would be problematic since it isn't really an
> asynchronous process. But hey, technical problems can be fixed :-)

Thanks Ross, that's helpful. From a UI perspective, some kind of
filtering or browsing by workgroup/domain seems like it would be
necessary.

Thinking about this some more, another thing that we'd to decide is
whether ad hoc network browsing is necessary from the file chooser...

Allan