[Thunar-dev] Network access in thunar?

[Erlend Davidson]

On 5 Aug 2006, at 16:44, Benedikt Meurer 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.

Editing fstab to mount the shares is good if you know the share  
exists - but often you don't know the precise share-name, or you're  
just looking around for network shares.  In these cases you'd have to  
resort to smbclient.

One of the really good features in konqueror is the network  
transparency.  It would be nice to have something similar in thunar,  
and since you probably don't want to implement all that in the file- 
manager (not everybody would want every protocol, and it just gives  
you more work) plugins might be a good idea.  A slow-down here  
(plugins being slower than something hardcoded into the application)  
is acceptable: networks are generally slower than your local machine,  
and used less too.