[Portland] xdg-vfs

[Bastian, Waldo]

>Hi,
>
>Now that i have almost finished the xdg-vfs backends for KIO and
>Gnome-VFS (they support the major operations necessary for
>file-management: get, put, cp, mv, rm, mkdir, rmdir, info, setattrs,
ls,
>openfildlg, savefildlg), there are some open questions:
>
>1) URI-escaping: Should URIs be passed/printed in escaped (%xx) form or
>not? (at the moment i think: no).

Escaping is part of the URI specification. There is no such thing as an
URI in "unescaped" form.

>Can someone please help me how to use
>KURL / GnomeVFSURI for the particular case of a cli app dealing with
URIs?
>
>What's the desired behavior of:
>
>$ xdg-vfs mkdir hello%20world
>
>Is the newline-character a safe way for seperating URIs in the output?

A newline or space can be used because such character is escaped when
used as part of the URI.

>And what about encodings?

The encoding should probably be specified on a per-method basis (e.g.
mailto, http, file) In particular you will probably want to use UTF-8 in
all cases except for file-URIs where you will want to use the locale
encoding to ensure that the octets of the URI match the byte
representation of the filename.

>2) Do you think i should link xdg-vfs in
>http://portland.freedesktop.org/wiki/TaskVFS? I know that xdg-vfs is
not
>a pretty solution, but at least it's a starting point for a generic vfs
>interface. I agree with Aaron J. Seigo that a library interface would
be
>better, but there is the problem with the event-loops.

Sure.

>3) Where to park the source-code of xdg-vfs?

Add it to xdg-utils in the understanding that it will not become part of
xdg-utils 1.0

>4) What about file-dialogs? I think the current solution with
>'xdg-file-dialog' or 'xdg-vfs openfiledialog' just won't work because
>many applications need to customize filedialogs. In my opinion a VFS
>interface like xdg-vfs should be 'used' by filedialogs rather than
>providing them (that's why i also put functions like ls, mkdir,... into
>xdg-vfs)

I agree. Please add those thoughts to the TaskVFS page on the wiki.
There are plans to look at the customization issue for the print dialog.
Once we manage to come up with a solution there, the same solution can
be used for the file dialog.

Cheers,
Waldo