Re: Plans for gnome-vfs replacement

[Alexander Larsson <alexl redhat com>]

On Wed, 2006-09-20 at 15:43 +0200, Paolo Maggi wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> > > 
> > > I was talking with Paolo about this and we were a bit concerned about
> > > the above paragraph... How it would work for the case where I simply
> > > want to drag an URI from firefox to gedit to open the file[1]?
> > 
> > We could have an api that lets you map a URI into a vfs object with a
> > more complicated API that lets the application have a dialog with the
> > user requesting things like authentication and prefered filename
> > encoding for the share (essentially a mount operation based on a uri).
> > We would need to use something like that anyway in the file selector,
> > because it would need to be able to mount things as you input locations.
> 
> It is not clear to me what do you mean with "mount operation based on a
> uri". Which is the semantic of such operation?
> 
> Suppose you want to open a single file on a web server.
> Is the mounting operation the creation of a HTTP session with the web
> server? Or what?

HTTP is a little trickier than most. If it was an ftp uri then the mount
operation would be about creating a session to the ftp server, picking
username (if that was not supplied), entering a password, negotiating
filename encodings, etc. This would then be part of the global state for
that mount, and further i/o operations could just happen, without any
complications.

Now, http is a stateless protocol, so it doesn't have anything like
this. Furthermore, the part of a http uri protected by a password is not
visible from the URI, as part of a server can be password protected.
This makes things trickier. I would say that mounting say a dav share
would consist of specifying the "root uri", connecting to that,
verifying it exists and that we can handle any password requests for it
would be enough.

However, just downloading a single file with http, on a server that
might not even support dav. I'm not sure exactly how to do that with a
stateful model. However you do it there is likely gonna be some boundary
case that bites you.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
 Alexander Larsson                                            Red Hat, Inc 
                   alexl redhat com    alla lysator liu se 
He's an unconventional vegetarian cop with nothing left to lose. She's a 
cosmopolitan streetsmart magician's assistant in the wrong place at the wrong 
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