Re: Plans for gnome-vfs replacement

[Alexander Larsson <alexl redhat com>]

On Fri, 2006-09-22 at 14:01 +0200, Alexander Larsson wrote:
> On Fri, 2006-09-22 at 10:53 +0200, Alexander Larsson wrote:
> > On Fri, 2006-09-22 at 10:49 +0200, Alexander Larsson wrote:
> > 
> > > I see that there has been no update to the lastest verson of the draft,
> > > even if it expires 31 May 2005. Does anyone know the status of this?
> > 
> > I spoke to quickly. This is now RFC 3987 since January 2005:
> > http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3987.txt
> 
> Ok. I've studied this a bit, and i think it would be quite possible to
> use URIs as the lowlever serialization form (i.e. what is passed between
> apps as commandline arguments, and DnD), but use absolute filenames if
> posible, and otherwise IRIs in the nautilus/file-selector location
> entry.

Actually, it still problematic in some cases. Consider a network share
(say ftp) that somehow (via prefs or the protocol) specifies what
encoding its filenames are in. The problem is that not all filenames
might be valid in this encoding (for instance, the server says
everything is in utf-8 but one file is in latin-1). 

If we want to use URIs we have to use the raw values of the filenames
and escape them. We can't do the conversion to utf8 for the uri, because
the conversion might fail, which would mean there are some files that we
can't specify via uris. Which means we can't for instance rename them
correctly or delete them. 

Since the IRIs are directly mapped to/from URIs we can only create
nicely readable IRIs in the case where the URI really uses utf8 for its
encoding. There are some cases where the URIs aren't UTF8, but we know
what encoding they are, so we could potentially show the filenames
nicer, like the above case where the FTP site specifying latin-1 or
local files with G_BROKEN_FILENAMES set. 

All is not lost though, even though we can't produce nice looking URIs
in these cases we can at least use our knowledge of the remote encoding
to get readable display names in the file selector and file manager
views, as these names doesn't have to losslessly round trip.

So, IRIs are better than URIs, but not perfect. They might still be our
best choice though.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
 Alexander Larsson                                            Red Hat, Inc 
                   alexl redhat com    alla lysator liu se 
He's a bookish Jewish shaman on a mission from God. She's an elegant tomboy 
college professor who hides her beauty behind a pair of thick-framed 
spectacles. They fight crime!