[Thunar-dev] D-Bus interface

[Benedikt Meurer]

Brian J. Tarricone wrote:
>>>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! ^_^

Weirdo. ;-)

>>>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.

It will be separate package (I named it "povolm" - "POrtable VOLume
Manager" - for now), and applications (including Thunar) will use the
system bus for communication. This way, there's only a well defined
interface and we get all the D-BUS security mechanisms for free (i.e.
SELinux/SEBSD).

>>>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 ^_^.

I think I'll use 0.8.0 for the first release (Xfce 4.4). This way it's
obvious to people that this version isn't complete yet.

>>>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.

Should be easy to extend if we use GetPropery()/SetProperty(), which are
already provided by D-BUS Glib bindings. This way we can simply add new
GObject properties later if required, without touching the 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.
> 
> 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.

What's most problematic from the file managers POV here is the multihead
support. It'd be very easy if you ignore multihead (like Nautilus does),
but that's not what I want for the final Thunar version.

For Xfce 4.4: xfdesktop would offer support for "Links on the desktop".
That is, the desktop wouldn't appear as a regular folder with all the
odds and evens, but it would just allow users to place shortcuts.
Everything in ~/Desktop (folders, files, symlinks, .desktop files, etc.)
will appear as "shortcut". Users can move them around, add new
shortcuts, double-click to launch/open, but that's all (well, you could
also link xfdesktop to thunarx and allow thereby people to use thunar
plugins as well).

> 	-brian

Benedikt