[Thunar-dev] D-Bus interface

[Benedikt Meurer]

Brian J. Tarricone wrote:
> Is there a need to expose more detailed functionality, like moving or
> copying files?  I'm not sure why other apps would need to do this, but
> it might be useful if someone can think of a use case.

Yeah, I thought about TransferFilesInto() already, but I dunno how hard
it will be to implement this in other file managers, so it's probably
something for the Thunar interface.

On the other hand it's very handy, if you need to move/copy around some
files, but want to take care of the user interaction yourself.

> Maybe expose a method to retrieve a file's mimetype?  Enumerate and
> eject removable devices?  I dunno - just throwing out ideas here.

For applications that need to determine a file's mimetype and similar
stuff, it may be better to link to thunar-vfs, as you usually don't just
determine the mime type for fun, but you want to do something with it. ;-)

Concerning the volume manager: I'd like to see this as a separate
service running as root, connected to the system bus. This way Thunar
(and other apps) would just need to connect to the volume manager and
don't need to care about system specific issues themselves. I have some
ideas for this, but with my current amount of spare time, this won't
make it for 1.0, unless somebody jumps in.

> Benny, going on a slight tangent, I believe you mentioned before that
> you did plan to have the backdrop handling in Thunar done for 1.0.  It
> might be useful to define a d-bus interface for this as well to cut down
> on user confusion regarding settings.  We could implement a settings
> dialog (or reuse parts of xfdesktop) that calls d-bus methods to set the
> backdrop (etc.) and not care which of xfdesktop, thunar, or xffm (if
> Edscott is willing to implement this as well) is running.  What do you
> think?

I'm thinking about dropping the desktop stuff for 1.0, and do it for
1.2. It'd be possible to implement the desktop stuff for 1.0, but it
would be pretty rough around the edges (-> buggy), which is not what I
want for a 1.0 release.

You can have a look at http://bugzilla.xfce.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1352,
which includes my current ideas for the configuration (the minimum
required configuration). This should be fairly easy to translate into a
D-BUS interface.

On the other hand, while thinking about this again: How about extending
xfdesktop for 4.4 to support very basic desktop icon functionality
(display the contents of ~/Desktop) and just invoke methods from the
org.xfce.FileManager interface? You can use thunar-vfs to determine
icons, display names, etc. of the files. Of course this would be
optional and maybe not perfect, but atleast Xfce 4.4 would have basic
support for desktop icons then. I'll need to think about this again tho,
just a quick&dirty idea for now.

> 	-brian

Benedikt