proceeding with KIO-GIOBridge...

[nf2]

Hi all,

I know that not everyone is convinced that KIO-GIOBridge is good or 
important for KDE - and i understand that those who have invested lots 
of time in writing and maintaining IO-slaves are not excited either.

However i would like to continue working on KIO-GIOBridge and make it 
easier for others to enable, test and use it. As GIO/GVFS is shipped 
with the new Gnome 2.22 there will be packages for all the major distros 
soon, backends for most of the popular file-management protocols already 
exist (and they are really working hard in making this a nice new VFS).

My problem is, that i need a way to (optionally) override a set of 
slaves that are installed with kdelibs and kdebase by just installing a 
package. At the moment this only works with my multiprotocol-io-slave 
patch: 
http://websvn.kde.org/trunk/playground/ioslaves/kio-giobridge/patches/kdelibs_kio_multiprotocol_slave.patch
... i'm not sure if that's good from design. Also, requiring to patch 
and recompile kdelibs is probably quite a barrier for those who are 
interested in KIO-GIOBridge. And as always in open-source, things only 
become better and more stable with more people joining in (I'm sure 
there are still lots of bugs).

One possibility would be having some kind of "priority=X" field in the 
*.protocol files, where handlers with a higher priority override the 
standard handlers. Another one to tag protocol handlers 
(flavor=kde-builtin of flavor=kiogio) and have a kio.conf somewhere to 
set the preferred flavor.

A multiprotocol feature wouldn't be bad either (one slave being able to 
serve multiple protocols), because that saves memory and launching time. 
Also copying/moving files can be handled inside the slave, rather than 
going through the app.

Regards,
Norbert