gnome-vfs Reality

[Fabio Gomes <bugtraq gs2 com br>]

Hello,

While trying to browse my local Samba domain through Nautilus, I noticed
the following problems: 

I type smb: in the Location bar and it prompts for my password. I type
it.
I click the domain. It prompts for my password again. I type it. 
I click the host. It prompts for my password again. I type it.
I click the share. It prompts for my password again. I type it.
Now I can access the files I need.

At least nautilus seems to save my password for the rest of the session,
meaning that I don't need to do this password hell until the next time I
log into GNOME.

When I found the text file I wanted to edit (document.txt), I double
clicked on it. Nautilus popped up an error dialog titled "Can't Open
Location", which said:

	The default action can't open "document.txt" because 
	it can't access files at "smb" locations.  Would you 
	like to choose another action?

Hmm. My default action for text files is to open with gedit, and it
works perfectly for local files. But let's give Nautilus a second
chance: I right-clicked the file, and Open With->gedit. Wow. gEdit
opened the file (after asking for my password again, of course). But
wait: I can't edit it. Even having full write access to the SMB share,
gEdit does not allow me to modify the file. So I need to "Save as..."
locally, edit it and then use Nautilus to copy the file back,
overwriting the original.

Reality: The most basic GNOME application, the default/official text
editor, does not support gnome-vfs entirely. 

IMHO, the lack of support for gnome-vfs in C programs is due to the fact
that developers must abandon the most basic filesystem-handling
functions in favor of GNOME-VFS ones. It means that even the skilled
hacker must *learn* how to open, write, read and close a file, for
example. And this sucks.

And the problem of having ugly/useless/broken gnome-vfs modules is due
to code duplication. It would be very better if GNOME-VFS was a wrapper
to the VFS code included in the kernel instead of reinventing the wheel.
Almost every POSIX system has the ability to mount remote locations. We
only need to learn how to handle this in GNOME. The stuff being done
this way would mean that every application in the system could benefit
from GNOME-VFS. Not only GNOME apps.

Maybe we need some kind of dynamic automount daemon. In contrast to the
automount daemon that we know, this one would not only mount filesystems
that are in a configuration file. It will mount anything that the user
wishes to access. It must interoperate with the desktop when the user
requests some remote location.

Was this already been discussed before?


-- 
Fabio Gomes de Souza <fabio gs2 com br> (+55 81 9127-0597)

.- GS2 TECNOLOGIA DA INFORMACAO LTDA :: www.gs2.com.br
|- IT Infrastructure :: Security :: Embedded systems :: Linux
`- Olinda, Brazil - +55 81 3492-7777 - negocios gs2 com br