Re: Plans for gnome-vfs replacement

[Alexander Larsson <alexl redhat com>]

On Mon, 2006-09-18 at 18:23 +0000, Nate Nielsen wrote:
> Awesome work Alex...
> 
> Alexander Larsson wrote:
> 
> <snip>
> 
> > These filenames would be the real identifier for the files, and as
> > such not really presentable to the user as it. You'd need to ask for
> > the display name via the vfs to get a user readable utf8-encoded
> > string for display. 
> 
> Do you see the display names being able to be mapped back to those
> identifiers? Or would it be sort of Windowsish where you can't type
> certain paths in explorer. As far as the user is concerned they just
> sort of start at some magical top level entity.
> 
> For example a lot of people currenty really like the Ctrl-L location box
> and the ability to type URIs. If the display names are typeable by the
> user, it may be worth trying to have the display names look similar to
> the URIs people are used to now...

There needs to be a way to map a display name entered by the user for
say a new file to be saved to a filename. I don't think we can guarantee
a roundtrip though. However, many filenames will be in the form of ascii
and utf8, so I think in most cases typing in a filename will work. Maybe
we can support a form of escaped text for input of non-utf8? Clearly
this needs some thinking.

> > I've been doing some initial sketching of the glib API, and I've
> > started by introducing base GInputStream and GOutputStream similar to
> > the stream objects in Java and .Net. These have async i/o support and
> > will make the API for reading and writing files nicer and more
> > modern. There is also a GSeekable interface that streams can
> > optionally implement if they support seeking.
> 
> Wonderful. This'll allow for things like seeking video to work without
> "Buffering..." on backends that support seek operations.

Not really. The "Buffering..." part is generally where the app streams
to fill its buffers before starting to play to avoid problems with
network performance.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
 Alexander Larsson                                            Red Hat, Inc 
                   alexl redhat com    alla lysator liu se 
He's a lounge-singing gay househusband haunted by memories of 'Nam. She's a 
sharp-shooting Bolivian opera singer who believes she is the reincarnation of 
an ancient Egyptian queen. They fight crime!