Re: Regarding Nautilus scripts

["D. D. Brierton" <darren dzr-web com>]

On Wed, 2003-06-11 at 00:41, Dave Camp wrote:

> Nautilus uses bonobo for its plugins, which is the standard way to do
> component software in gnome.  Bonobo uses .server files.  If you would
> like to discuss the bonobo design decisions wrt server files, please
> start a new thread on gnome-components-list.
> 
> Software installation on unix is generally not a matter of putting a .so
> somewhere.  We're not going to design around that fact for one tiny bit
> of the system

I've been following this thread, and I've been getting increasingly
confused about what Eugenia was asking for, but I think maybe it's
clicked.

First, my confusion at what Eugenia was saying: downloading a "file" and
dragging and dropping it in Nautilus to some special location in my home
directory is no easier than downloading an RPM (or a package for
whatever flavour distro I'm running) and installing it by
double-clicking on it in Nautilus and firing up the graphical installer
that most modern distros come with nowadays.

However (and I'm *not* especially advocating this, just throwing it up
for discussion), what about the case where I'm just a lowly user on a
network to which I don't have privileges to install RPMs and I have
sufficiently annoyed the sysadmin in the past that he's unlikely to put
himself out to install anything just for me. Nevertheless, there is a
handy Nautilus plugin/addon which I would genuinely find useful. Would
it be useful to have a way for Nautilus to be able to install such
addons for the current user only? Just as, for example, some big Mozilla
packages come as RPMs (DOM-Inspector, Venkman) for simple installation
site-wide using the system packaging system, but also come as XPI files
which (I believe) can be installed by the user into ~/.mozilla at a
single click. I've often heard similar arguments raised about (La)TeX
(and friends) packages, and Emacs lisp packages: users would often like
a simple way to install them which is independent of the system wide
packaging system.

I'd like to say again that I'm not really suggesting this as it sounds
like a lot of work for a little gain, but is this what Eugenia was
asking for? A Nautilus internal way of installing plugins? For example,
a user clicks on a link on a web page for a resource which is of
MIME-type "application/x-nautilus-plugin for which the helper app is
Nautilus, and it knows to install the various bits and pieces into
~/.nautils/bonobo or wherever. That would actually be simpler than
downloading a file and copying it or installing it: click on a link and
the plugin is installed automatically, like in Mozilla.

Best, Darren

-- 
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D. D. Brierton            darren dzr-web com          www.dzr-web.com
       Trying is the first step towards failure (Homer Simpson)
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