[Thunar-dev] Network access in thunar?

[Benedikt Meurer]

Stephan Arts wrote:
>>>>Will Thunar eventually support network access such as accessing your
>>>>Samba shares? In Gnome, it's possible to connect to the network using
>>>>e.g. smb://mycomputer or ssh://me@server. Currently, for these use
>>>>cases I have to start Nautilus (and make sure I don't just start
>>>>"nautilus", or my desktop will be overtaken by it!).
>>>
>>>It would be interesting to see this kind of functionality. It has been
>>>discussed before, thunar won't support it by default (IIRC), but
>>>eventually it will be possible to write plugins for these things.
>>
>>Well, I have a patch to add samba support based on libsmbclient, but it
>>doesn't work properly right now (esp. auth handling with libsmbclient is
>>a mess). I have received several feature requests for samba support, so
>>I guess that's atleast important enough to think about this again.
>>
>>Maybe I'll commit that for RC1, but disabled by default. Dunno yet.
> 
> Do you want to support it by extentions, or build-in?
> 
> I'd prefer extentions, because that makes it possible for developers
> to extend it beyond smb. Support for SSH, FTP or WebDAV can be written
> too by someone if (s)he wants it. Like thunar-apr, thunar-uca or
> thunar-sbr, these things could also be supported (and installed) if
> someone wants it. And removed if (s)he doesn't.

It'll be builtin just like the trash support. Can however be disabled
during compilation. A plugin framework for thunar-vfs is a 2.0 topic (if
at all). Allowing external plugins will always decrease both the
flexibility and the performance, and usually causes maintaince problems.
Just see gnome-vfs and nautilus interaction for an example here (for
example an sshfs will have totally different UI/actions requirements
than the trashfs, so even tho it can be extended "dynamically", the UI
will still have to be updated to make sense or i.e. you'll get a "Move
to Trash" for sshfs, although the trash spec doesn't allow remote files
and the like[1], and of course at a way higher cost). Some backends may
be served by a plugin later, but for now I don't have time nor energy to
maintain a stable plugin interface, but stability is what we want now
for 4.4.0. The thunar-vfs API/ABI is stable and makes sense - well
except for thunar_vfs_info_rename() - which is way more important,
because the thunar-vfs internals can be changed very easily without even
the need to recompile applications (because of said UI tweaks that
doesn't however apply to Thunar, of course).

> Stephan

Benedikt

[1] This is actually one of the major usability problems in GNOME:
gnome-vfs can be extended in a way that the application's UI doesn't
make sense anymore, which is then worked around, resulting in either
even more UI breakage, or hacky code.