Re: File Dialog

[Liam Quin <liam holoweb net>]

On Sat, Apr 14, 2001 at 10:03:42AM -0400, Alan Cox wrote:
[someone else wrote]
>> IMHO, reload buttons should really /never/ be needed, esp. for local
>> filsystems
agreed
>> a kernel-level filesystem notification system should
>> provide updates toall views of various directories or files.
Also agreed...

> Even entirely in userspace you can achieve that well enough with a couple of
> second stat on the directory you are watching. Sun's openlook file manager
> did that bit quite nicely

Yes. Actually I think it probably also used tooltalk for notifcation,
so that if you used drag and drop to save a file, for example,
the file manager could find out withut even having to do a stat().

That's a client-side notification system, and obviously doesn't work for
files produced as output not using the gui, hence the stat() was done too.
There was a preference, I think, for how often to check.

The open look file manager did indeed start up in a user's home
directory, by the way, but did not support desktop icons, as those
were reserved for representing running programs.

If, as someone told me recently, there are still more users of the
open look OpenWindows environment than CDE on Solaris, it is really
worth exploring why.  On Solaris, Gnome will be competing more against
that than against CDE; on Linux and other platforms, the lessons
will be useful, I expect.  What did CDE do wrong?

Lee

-- 
Liam Quin - Barefoot in Toronto - liam holoweb net - http://www.holoweb.net/
Ankh: irc.sorcery.net www.valinor.sorcery.net irc.gnome.org www.advogato.org
author, The Open Source XML Database Toolkit, Wiley, August 2000
Co-author, The XML Specification Guide, Wiley, 1999