A dbus-based protocol for direct save drag/drop

[Harald Hvaal]

Hello

As some of you might have read on the planet, I'm working on fixing up
the drag/drop in Ark. As a part of this, I needed to find a way to
have direct saving drag/drop, in other words, a way for ark to extract
directly to where the user's drag leads, and not do it beforehand.
(more information here:
http://metelliuscode.wordpress.com/2008/07/17/long-lasting-dragdrops-in-ark-and-xdnd-timeouts/
)

I first tried to look at the XDS protocol, but this eventually was a
dead end because of lack of Qt/x11 information in regards to drag/drop
(besides, this would be a platform specific solution anyways).

So what I am thinking now is to do it in a more qt-like way, using
DBUS for communication between Ark and the file manager. The drag will
contain a text/uri-list as a fallback, and also some kind of an unique
ID that will let the filemanager inform Ark where the file manager
wishes ark to extract the dragged files. Next, Ark then extracts the
files to the supplied location, and finally maybe informs the file
manager of the result (if the file manager wishes to maybe freeze the
ui etc.) This is quite similar to the way XDS does the communication,
except it's not done with platform specific XLib, but instead DBUS.

I would like some comments on this suggestion, and suggestions to make
it better. Maybe even such a protocol already exists? Maybe the DBUS
protocol could be even more involved than just transferring the simple
location of the directory.

Thanks

Harald Hvaal
haraldhv at stud.ntnu.no