[Thunar-dev] Network access in thunar?

[Danny Milosavljevic]

Hi,

On Sat, 12 Aug 2006 19:52:36 +0200, David Tenser wrote:

> On 8/12/06, Danny Milosavljevic <danny.milo at scratchpost.org> wrote:
>>
>> Hi,
>>
>> On Sat, 05 Aug 2006 13:58:16 -0500, Ori Bernstein wrote:
>>
>> > On Sat, 5 Aug 2006 17:31:33 +0200, "David Tenser"
>> > <djst.mozilla at gmail.com
>> > > said:
>> >
>> >> On 8/5/06, Benedikt Meurer <benedikt.meurer at unix-ag.uni-siegen.de>
>> >> wrote:
>> >
>> >> Of course, even if Thunar eventually gets samba (omitting ssh) support,
>> >> it's not very useful unless other applications, such as the media
>> >> player, can handle the URIs.
>>
>> BLAH. The thing to fix that properly is called a "mount".
> 
> 
> 
>> I'm so tired of everone and their brother inventing yet another VFS layer
>> for no good reason (other that "I'm too lazy to fix the other one" - you
>> know, the one in the kernel).
> 
> 
> If you ask my mom (just as an example, not that she knows anything about
> what we're discussing here), it's not an issue about laziness. Editing
> /etc/fstab is hard. 

You don't need to.

> Putting the password directly in that file is also
> insecure. 

As is everything that doesn't ask for the password _every single time_.
I vote for ".netrc" for saving the passwords.
As for prompting for the password, I'm not sure... know of any framework
[only!] for prompting passwords that we could use ? Like ssh-askpass ?

Do we need some keyring-like thing?

> Browsing the network in Windows with Explorer is easy. You
> just click away and if prompted, enter a password. Any file you click on
> will work in any application you throw the file at. I ask: wouldn't that
> be nice to have in Linux/Xfce?

Yeah, would be nice indeed.

> 
> If Xfce could somehow automatically mount network shares as you browse
> through them, that would of course work. I'm more interested in the
> usability aspect than the technical details.

I'm just trying to fend off the inevitable "sure, let's
direct-link the smbclient library, write 100000 lines of code and
fork every single program under the sun to use xyz-vfs instead".
Since it always seems easier in the beginning and only starts to smell
really bad later :)

I'd suggest writing a FUSE module that browses the smb neighbourhood (if
that program is not already available) and creates fake directories for
every host / user with a placeholder file.

If the filemanager detects the file system type and sees the placeholder
file somewhere on that filesystem, it mounts. Done.

You could even do an automount of sorts, if you like to. (I'd not do that
in the first step, though)

And in the end we'd have even a nice currently logged in host&user list.
In the mountpoint.

Probably a small python or even shell script prototype would be easy to do
of all that.

While we are at wishful thinking, network host autodiscovery would be nice
(like with mDNS / DNS-SD).

And maybe even some of these things are already done... :)

cheers,
  Danny