Re: File Dialog

[Maciej Stachowiak <mjs eazel com>]

Havoc Pennington <hp@redhat.com> writes:

> Maciej Stachowiak <mjs@eazel.com> writes: 
> > I don't think this is even worth considering. The GNOME 2.0 file
> > selection dialog is likely to require so many kinds of changes to
> > provide all the features that are available with various GNOME
> > libraries, that is incredibly unlikely building on a Gtk-only widget
> > will be a at all useful (no matter how much a priori thinking about
> > what extensibility hooks might be needed has gone into it).
> > 
> > For example, one proposal on the table is to embed suitably
> > scaled-down (functionally, not just visually) versions of the various
> > Nautilus directory views via Bonobo.
> > 
> 
> I disagree that it's pointless. If you are going to have Nautilus be
> the file selector, then GNOME hooks are pointless, yes. If you just
> want an in-process file selection widget, it should not be rocket
> science to virtualize getting an icon for a file, tab completions, and
> getting file listings. It should be pretty easy to figure that out.

I'm saying that we don't know enough about the UI or architecture of
the future GNOME 2.0 dialog to design in enough extensibility hooks
for it. I was citing one definite example where it's clear these hooks
would not be useful.

To cite another example based on your premise above, for remote
locations it would be desirable to have the file selector load the
file list asynchronously, without blocking the UI. But certainly the
most straightforward way of virtualizing "getting file listings" would
not make this feasible.
 
> This stuff is useful to have virtualized anyway, it allows people to
> add their own directory filtering and name completion hacks.

It might be useful for that reason, but we shouldn't assume
virtualizing these things will allow us to get a good GNOME 2.0 file
selector.

We should instead move forward on the assumption that the GNOME 2.0 and
Gtk+ 2.0 file selectors will be entirely separate bodies of code.

 - Maciej