Re: File selector talk writeup

[Thomas Leonard <tal00r ecs soton ac uk>]

On Thu, Feb 13, 2003 at 06:43:52PM -0500, Owen Taylor wrote:

[ DnD/Remote saving ]

> I'd have to say this is all out of the scope of what I was considering
> for the GTK+ file selector. Everything is a lot simpler if the 
> file selector is simply a way of getting a filename or filenames.
> 
> If you actually do the saving as part of the interface, then 
> you get all sorts of additional problems:
> 
>  - Stream interfaces. gnome-vfs has an entirely different stream
>    interface, so does Bonobo, if I recall. GIOChannel is in GLib, but
>    rather crude, etc. I assume that ROX's stream interfaces are
>    different from any of these.

ROX-Lib uses python streams, but applications can override the default
handlers at various levels (eg, to create a directory rather than a file).
This is why I suggested still using a path-based API for GTK. It's pretty
easy for the file selector to save to /tmp and then do whatever it likes
with the result.

>  - Backup files,

This is actually easier with the stream API, since ROX-Lib does it for you
;-)

>  - Libraries for saving content that want just a filename.
> 
> It seems to me that with a filename based approach, what you loose for
> DND saving are:

I'm still suggesting a filename based approach, just that:

1) We separate the actual save location (eg, /tmp) from the reported save
location (eg, a remote URI or nothing at all), and

2) The savebox should know when the save is finished. The default could
close the dialog, so it wouldn't be any extra effort to use it. After all,
you can't close the dialog until you know the save was successful (doing
it the other way around doesn't quite work, because the user might have
cancelled the save).

Hope that clears things up a bit. I'm not suggesting anything as
full-featured as the ROX-Lib API
(http://rox.sourceforge.net/rox_lib_docs/rox.saving.html).


-- 
Thomas Leonard			http://rox.sourceforge.net
tal00r ecs soton ac uk		tal197 users sourceforge net
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