Re: Writing a Nautilus view

[Darin Adler <darin bentspoon com>]

On Sunday, May 5, 2002, at 04:38  AM, Maciej Stachowiak wrote:

> > 3) Is it possible to use the nautilus icon container when writing a
> >    stand-alone view? The same goes for NautilusFile? As far as I can
> >    tell they are defined in libnautilus-private, and therefore
> >    impossible to access from the outside.
>
> Yes, they are sadly inaccessible from the outside because they are
> really appropriate to be moved out. I hope that someday they can be
> moved to eel, but I don't know when Darin and Alex will decide this is
> appropriate.

The icon container could move to eel any time, but it needs some development work to fully decouple it from Nautilus file manager icon view features. Mainly, the code for dragging is compiled right in even though it's file manager specific. It needs to be factored so that the icon container is not at all specific to the file manager. In my opinion, a properly refactored copy of the Nautilus icon container code would be a great candidate for libgnomeui some day, and would likely be a great replacement for GnomeIconList, which was the code it started with in the first place.

The NautilusFile/Directory machinery would be harder to move to eel. The biggest issues there are synchronization between processes that use NautilusFile and the CORBA API that's used to share access to metafiles. But it would be good to do it.

I'd be happy to consult with anyone who wants to tackle either or both of these important-long-term development tasks.

    -- Darin