Re: [Nautilus-list] Nautilus now officially dependent on Ammonite when compiled with --enable-eazel-services

[Maciej Stachowiak <mjs eazel com>]

Greg Stein <gstein lyra org> writes:

> On Wed, Aug 30, 2000 at 09:38:45PM -0700, Maciej Stachowiak wrote:
>
> > However, adding more dependencies to gnome-vfs, especially ones that
> > are not already tied tot he GNOME release schedule, would be a
> > pain.
> 
> I can understand this. Certainly an issue, but I would simply say that *if*
> you're going to do it, then you've gotta deal with the issue at some point.
> Probably easier to do sooner rather than later.

I disagree. If neon ever reaches the point where it has a very stable
API and is widely installed, depending on it would be less of an
issue.

> > So I think we would need to see some major concrete benefits to
> > using Neon instead of implementing missing functionality directly in
> > order to switch.
> 
> Concrete benefits? Sure. Areas where gnome-vfs (http/dav) is lacking:
> 

I'll comment first that I don't know what many of the below things
are, so I don't know how they benefit the user.

>
> *) Digest authentication
> *) HTTP/1.1 support: chunked transfer encoding, persistent connections
>  [ note the above two are *required* by RFC 2518 (WebDAV) ]

Required of the client or required of the server? If the former, we
are in trouble.

> *) SSL support

We're waiting on the legal issues (RSA patent deathwatch)

> *) proxy support
> *) proxy authentication
> *) 100-Continue handling
> *) bugs due to lack of broad use and young codebase.
>    [ for example, the PROPFIND result parser does not distinguish between
>      the DAV:getcontenttype and http://example.com/davprops/getcontenttype
>      elements. it also does not handle the DAV:status element. ]
> *) 301/302 redirect handling
> *) extended property (metadata) support: PROPFIND, PROPPATCH
> *) DAV lock handling
> *) choice of libxml or Expat   [GNOME would just use libxml]
>

It seems at least some of these things could not be cleanly expressed
in the gnome-vfs API.

And I think we do have proxy support, at least I remember Mike Fleming
angsting about a proxy-related checkin.

> I am not intending to knock all the great work that has gone into it. But
> there is so much more that is possible. And with little development work for
> you, too :-)

I would love it if Ian McKeller, who's done most of our WebDAV and
http stuff, would comment on this stuff. I don't really know much
about it. I'm just semi-rationally afraid of adding mroe dependencies.

 - Maciej