Re: Implementing bluetooth:/// in gnome-vfs

[Alexander Larsson <alexl redhat com>]

On Fri, 2006-05-19 at 04:20 +0200, P. Durante wrote:

> After my experience I would NOT reccomend gnome-vfs for what you want
> to do, gnome-vfs is mainly focused on browsing _files_, I tried to
> hack bluetooth service browsing in it but the result wasn't quite
> satisfactory (as services are not actually files, I had to create some
> fake .desktop files on the fly and feed them to the gnome-vfs layer). 
> Of course it can be done, and probably way better than how I did,
> another option would be to improve gnome-bluetooth, or even to rewrite
> everything from scratch like I did (see the bluetooth browser in the
> screenshot, the gnome-vfs plugin was actually only a side project),
> the choice is up to you :-) 

This is why I tell everyone that want to make gnome-vfs backends for
"strange" backends that its probably a bad idea. 

If you find yourself implementing a gnome-vfs backend, ask yourself the
question "would you save a document from OpenOffice on this backend",
and if the answer is no, then using gnome-vfs for what you're doing is
probably not a good idea. 

If your main reason for writing a vfs backend is to show a list of icons
and names in a user interface via the filemanager, then gnome-vfs is
definitely the wrong approach. There are much easier, saner ways to do
that, which all leads to a user interface that is much easier to use and
doesn't confuse the whole "what is a file" aspect of the desktop
environment.