Re: Progress on GtkFileChooser

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

On Sun, 2003-03-30 at 15:36, Pavel Machek wrote:
> Hi!
> 
> >  - Network URI's for GtkFileSystemGnomeVFS ... there is a need to tie
> >    every URI back to a file system root, at least for the sample
> >    chooser user interface with the tree. (And for sanity, in general.)
> > 
> >    Probably the right way to do this is to have a special root - say
> >    'network-servers:' that has as children the toplevel URI for every
> >    referenced network folder:
> > 
> >     network-servers:
> >       http://www.gnome.org/
> >       ftp://ftp.gnome.og
> > 
> >    Or whatever.
> 
> (Disclaimer: I have not seen gnomevfs
> for very long time).
> 
> You might want to use mc's convention,
> where you have /#ftp:ftp.gnome.org/.
> You can't really bring http into picture
> as http does not have a notion of directory
> listing.

The current API's for GtkFileSystem don't interpret paths in
URI's in any way. Rather, an they are just opaque strings
with the file system having virtualized functions:

 - Find a parent path (if it isn't one of the enumerated
   roots)
 - Combine a parent path with a child name to form a child
   path.

I'm strongly thinking of making the "path strings" not 
correspond to URIs at all, and simply have functions to
convert 

 path string => URI
 path string => filename

At that point, a VFS backend could use MC syntax if it wanted
to, and then convert ftp URI's to standard URI syntax
on return.

> You can't really have
> /network-servers/ftp://ftp.gnome.org, as
> it would mean that pressing UP arrow in
> it would put you into /n*s/ftp:. Ouch.

No, up from ftp://ftp.gnome.org would put you in network-servers: 
which, once you left ftp://ftp.gnome.org might well be an
empty directory.

> Also mc has sane ability to work with
> archives. tar:bar/baz/baf.tar/foo is not
> reasonable syntax; /bar/baz/baf.tar#utar/foo is.
> (Because if bar is tar archive and baf.tar
> is normal directory...)

Since GNOME-vfs does use and expose URI syntax, if you were going 
to use a tar backend for gnome-vfs, you would have to invent
some URI-compliant syntax for chained URIs. But that really
isn't the file selector's problem.

Regards,
                                              Owen