ftp and Nautilus

[Laszlo Kovacs <Laszlo Kovacs Sun COM>]

Hello everybody,

This mail is about this bug:

http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=114572

A number of bugs have been closed as a duplicate of this one so there 
seems to be some interest for it.

This bug has taken up a lot of time probably because of the wrong 
approach for fixing it (sticking a patch in bugzilla and then reworking 
it several times as people complained about it).

What I am trying to understand is how the authentication behaviour in 
Nautilus should be. Some people think that anonymous login should be 
tried before asking the user for username/password if one has not been 
provided. This complicates things a bit.

The right way of doing this to me seemed to try anonymous first (only if 
there was no username *and* password provided), but still pop up the 
dialog to the user with anonymous filled in. This is needed as otherwise 
the user will never be able to log in as anything else if anonymous 
login is allowed on the server. If they choose at this stage to store 
this on the keyring then anonymous will be used in the future.

If this step fails then show the dialog again with no username and 
password and let the user to fill in the details.

If there was a username in the URL then only the second dialog is shown, 
if there was a password as well then no dialog is shown.

I don't think this solution with two dialogs is the best, but I couldn't 
think of anything better.

The problem is that in the first dialog if I fill in "anonymous" as the 
username then the username is not editable in the dialog. So if the user 
does not want anonymous then can not change it in the dialog, they need 
to press cancel and wait for the second dialog to turn up which is not 
great from a usability point of view.

I am running out of ideas, perhaps anybody has some thoughts on this?

Thanks,

Laszlo