Re: what's happening to Nautilus, other packages (Eazel)

[Ian McKellar <yakk-nautilus yakk net au>]

On Tue, May 15, 2001 at 07:47:22PM -0700, Maciej Stachowiak wrote:
> begin  Ian McKellar quotation:
> > 
> > Right now I'm hacking on SSL support and a couple of other things to let
> > people use gnome-vfs as the best backend for all browser-type applications.
> > I've got some other ideas my sleeve for the GNOME 2.0 time-frame that I
> > can't think of right now ;-)
> > 
> > Let me know if you've got some ideas for what we can do to make gnome-vfs
> > better.
> > 
> 
> HTTP POST support. It's not totally obvious to me how to design the
> API for that. But it's worth noting that the pipe: module has
> semantics more like POST than GET, really.

Mike had a really neat idea on how to do this. His recent work has added
generic callback support - so methods can define method-specific callbacks
(for example to allow better authentication, redirect and cookie support
for http, etc...). As part of this work he has created the concept of
thread-local application contexts that you can add callbacks to and set
properties on. His idea for POST was to add allow a property to be set
on the application context for an open which would flag that an open for
write should use POST rather than PUT. This eliminates the need for
a new API. I think its also pretty much the right thing to do design wise.
POST and PUT are just two different ways of writing data to a URI.
> 
> Also, replace uses of Method in the API with Module (or perhaps the
> slightly less accurate but perhaps more clear Protocol or
> ProtocolHandler) , because it's kind of confusing as it is. (http is a
> protocol or URI scheme, GET is a method).

I think protocol is a bad name to use. Scheme is the name used in the URI
rfc, so perhaps talking about schemes and scheme modules would be the best
way. And I don't care if it confuses you damned lisp-mit-people ;-)

Ian