Proposed draft for the thumbnail D-Bus specification

[David Zeuthen]

On Fri, 2008-10-17 at 14:58 +0300, Marius Vollmer wrote:
> I'd say you need common code, not just a common spec.  It's too hard
> (and pretty pointless) to make two VFS implementations interoperate.
> 'Just' use a single one that is flexible enough for everyone.

This might be off-topic but in effect this is exactly what we're doing
for the upcoming GNOME 2.26 release. In a nutshell, any application
using gio to launch other applications (via desktop files) will always
pass (as %u) the POSIX path into the gvfs fuse mount ($HOME/.gvfs) if
there's a corresponding stateful gvfs mount available (and, of course,
if FUSE is available). If there's no gvfs fuse mount, we just pass the
URI like we used to.

So this means that e.g. Nautilus will always pass a POSIX path to an
application meaning that you no longer have the URI interpretation /
authentication problems since all IO is using gio. It works pretty well,
for example launching mplayer from a sftp://, dav://, smb://, whatever
location in the file manager Just Works(tm). Ditto for other
applications.

FWIW, Fedora been shipping these patches since Fedora 9 / GNOME 2.22 and
it works great, no complaints. I blogged about this some weeks ago, see
http://blog.fubar.dk/?p=104 for more details. I think I would encourage
other VFS systems to do something similar but that's of course up to
them.

    David