[Thunar-dev] Thunar Extension Framework

[Benedikt Meurer]

Lindsay Holmwood wrote:
>>Maybe not for version one, but I think that it would be really interesting to
>>allow extensions to define "virtual files" and "virtual directories", in
>>addition to adding menu items and such.
>>
>>Use cases that I can see would be allowing programs like "Beagle" to provide
>>virtual folders as a plubin, which would contain running [saved] queries, or to
>>allow navigation within a tarball, or maybe some sort of "directory unifier"
>>plugin, to allow displaying all document directories across the computer as
>>one directory, and many other interesting uses.
>>
>>Of course, this is just an idea that I think would be cool to have.
> 
> That's quite a neat idea. I could see that type of filesystem 
> abstraction being rather helpful for sysadmins who want to dumb down or 
> even restrict the filesystem heirarchy to users.
> 
> It'd also be pretty rad if you could view all the changes you make 
> throughout your home dir, grouped in directories by date. Would work a 
> treat if you were a heavy desktop icons/folder user.
> 
> The fact that there'll be language bindings will make it a cinch to 
> implement too. Something to hack on if I have spare time. :-)

The extension framework is not meant to solve these issues. For this
kind of "extensibility" we'd need to either (a) export a lot of
internals of the file manager or (b) extend the VFS layer. While my
original plan was to do (a), I've came to the conclusion, that this is
not a really good idea, and (b) would do better here (together with a
flexible metadata framework). But (b) requires a *LOT* of work.

> Lindsay

Benedikt