[Thunar-dev] Network access in thunar?

[David Tenser]

On 8/5/06, Benedikt Meurer <benedikt.meurer at unix-ag.uni-siegen.de> wrote:
>
> Stavros Giannouris wrote:
> >>In Windows, a "samba" share is like
> >>any other folder to the applications, because the support is
> >>implemented in the system-level. In other words, it doesn't matter to
> >>mplayer2.exe if I double-clicked on "C:\file.avi" or
> >>"\\share\file.avi". To the application, both paths point to a file.
> >>
> >>This kind of transparent network support is what I'm really asking
> >>for, but maybe it's not suitable in this Thunar-specific mailing list.
> >>Gnome seems (?) to have started to implement this, but it looks like
> >>they implemented it in the application-level (e.g. totem has support
> >>for smb://.. URIs while rhytmbox doesn't).
> >>
> >>I have all my media (music, movies, etc) stored on my server which I
> >>can access with samba or ssh. If I want to access these files, I need
> >>to use e.g. Totem instead of Xfce's media player since the latter has
> >>no support for network shares.
> >
> > If you have some samba shares that you need to have constant access to,
> > you can always create an fstab entry for them and mount them through
> > smbfs/cifs. Then all will be transparent.
> > The other solutions (like smb:// uris in gnome-vfs) are mere
> > workarounds to enable occasional & quick access for non-priviledged
> > users to those shares.
>
> Exactly. And that's also the reason why I'm not sure that smb support
> should be provided by the file manager.


I don't know the optimal solution, but to the average user, editing
/etc/fstab isn't exactly convenient. I know it can be done but I stopped
doing it because the mount points become invalid after restoring from
hibernation (which I use often on my laptop), but that's another bug
unrelated to Thunar.

Building a file manager today without support for network shares just seems
strange to me. However, I somewhat agree that implementing the support
directly in the file manager isn't ideal. It should be seamless to the user
on another level. Perhaps auto-mounting network shares in the same way as
USB-disks are mounted? E.g. using smbfs and mount it to
/media/[server]/[share] so all other applications would get a valid URI.
Just brainstorming.

-- 
David Tenser
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