[Thunar-dev] D-Bus interface

[Brian J. Tarricone]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

On 1/31/2006 3:21 PM, Benedikt Meurer wrote:
> 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. ;-)

Agreed, though sometimes I *do* just look at file mimetypes for fun.
Kidding! ^_^

> 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.

Cool idea.  I get a slight headache though when thinking about including
run-as-root system services, since the deployment is a bit of an issue,
and distro pacakgers usually need to do something custom to get this
working right within their frameworks.  But of course when it doesn't
work, we get the bug reports.

>> 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.

Understood.  Your discipline for recognising what you do and don't have
time for, and deciding to put stuff off until it's right, continues to
amaze me ^_^.

> 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.

Yep, that's simple enough.  It might be useful to extend that in some
areas to support more complicated features, but we can leave that for later.

> 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.

I'm not sure whether or not I have time to do this, but it doesn't sound
*too* difficult.  (I've pretty much resigned myself to not having time
to finish xfmedia 1.0 in time for 4.4.0, so I can put off some xfmedia
work.)  The window icon stuff is way more intertwined with the rest of
the desktop code than I intended, but it would certainly be possible to
reuse the drawing bits to draw the contents of ~/Desktop using thunar.
I'll try and look into this over the weekend.

	-brian


-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.1 (MingW32)

iD8DBQFD3/VP6XyW6VEeAnsRAkXFAJ9/dXAe00jmBKTTDkymyBaIQoVJBQCgmz6t
lBadcgSUefyOZvjF7uL+Hps=
=XTwS
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----