Re: Filesel dnd patch

[Alex Larsson <alexl redhat com>]

On Wed, 29 Aug 2001, Darin Adler wrote:

> On Tuesday, August 28, 2001, at 03:46  PM, Owen Taylor wrote:
> 
> > Actually, for the file selector, I think you might just want to
> > accept paths even if they have the wrong hostname; in some sense
> > the user is dropping the path not the file that the path points.
> 
> So you're saying if I drop the icon of a file on another machine (is that 
> how these file URIs with different host names will actually arise in 
> practice?), that it's OK if the file selector opens a different file that 
> happens to be at the same path on my machine?
> 
> Since I have no idea when this can actually happen, I have to limit myself 
> to asking questions. I don't really have an opinion, because I can't 
> imagine when you'd be able to perform a drag of a file URI for a file on 
> another computer.

Consider this, You have gmc (not managing the root window) running on 
machine a, and some other application running on machine b, both 
displaying on the Xserver running on machine b.

Now, consider if you navigate to /etc in gmc, and then drag the "passwd" 
file and drop it on the fileselector. The uri passed here is 
file://a/etc/passwd, and the fileselector has two options. Either select 
/etc/passwd on the local machine (which is probably a different file), or 
bail out, saying that it was a non-local file.

But consider also if you navigate to $HOME in gmc, and drag a file from 
there to the fileselector. And furthermore, the two machines share the 
home directories using NFS (quite common in cases where you're using 
remote X apps). In this case bailing and refusing to handle the 
"non-local" file is bad, because even though the uri is non-local you can 
still access it.

/ Alex