[Geany] GVFS / Remote file editing

[Enrico Tröger]

Hey all,

since there were a couple of requests during the last days, here is a
short summary about Geany and GVFS.

As you probably know, GVFS, the successor of gnome-vfs but without
hard gnome-dependencies, is available on most modern distributions and
provides the possibility to open/save/edit/delete files on remote
servers (ftp, ssh, smb, obex, webdav and some more). And it's working
quite good, AFAIK.

The present:
-----------------
Currently you need to GVFS' fuse backend to edit files remotely with
Geany. This means, you need to have FUSE installed and it must be
working (i.e. the kernel module must be already loaded), you must have
installed the GVFS FUSE daemon("gvfs-fuse-daemon") and then you connect
to a server using GVFS (e.g. with nautilus or for non-Gnome users with
'gvfs-mount URI' [1]).
If the connection was successfully established, you will find a new
subdirectory in ~/.gvfs/ with the name of the connection. In this
subdirectory the remote filesystem can be found and accessed with Geany
like any other local file.
This should work in most cases and without problems.
But you won't see the connected servers in the file open dialogue
directly.

Hint: when actively working with remote files, especially when
connected over a slow connection or to slow servers, it might be a good
idea to disable the disk check timeout in Geany's preferences dialogue
(only in for Geany's SVN version) or increase the timeout value.
Otherwise it might happen that the GUI may become a little
unresponsively because Geany checks by default every 30 seconds for
file changes to notify you.


The future:
---------------
Once GTK 2.14 is released, there will be native support for GVFS in
GTK. This means you can then see GVFS connections in the GTK file open
dialogues in apps which support this.
Geany will probably support this too although we won't support GVFS
directly, at least not in the near future. Instead, we will indirectly
add GVFS support. Geany's file open/save dialogues will present the
GVFS mounts and you can browse them to open/save files but Geany will
download the remote file, save it locally and send it back to the
server when you save the file. This will probably happen completely
transparent so you won't notice this at all.
The reason for this indirect support is that it does requires less
changing in the current code, so there are probably less new bugs and
the code stays more maintainable and compatible with older GLib/GTK
installations (GVFS is only available with GLib version 2.16+, not all
users already have it). Another reason for the indirect support is that
we don't have to convert/rewrite the tagmanager/ctags code which
also can't handle GVFS URIs.
In the long term, full GVFS support is desired and probably will come
at some day.


[1] Use 'gvfs-mount URI' to mount remote filesystems. URI might be
something like:
ftp://username@ftp.server.tld/
sftp://username@server.tld


Regards,
Enrico

-- 
Get my GPG key from http://www.uvena.de/pub.asc
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