Re: [Lxde-list] The per-folder settings implementation.

[Andrej N. G. <an...@re...>]

    Hello!

PCMan has written on Thursday, 21 November, at  1:17:
>On Wed, Nov 20, 2013 at 11:21 PM, Andrej N. Gritsenko <an...@re...>wrote:
>> Jerome Leclanche has written on Monday, 18 November, at 12:33:
>> >Is this available in pcmanfm-qt when rebuilding with latest libfm?
>> >J. Leclanche

>>     Nope. This is in pcmanfm (gtk), because it touches only GUI-related
>> settings so cannot be in libfm and therefore should be implemented in Qt
>> separatedly. I'm sorry.

>No, I don't completely agree with this idea.
>A better approach is modifying fm_app_config_get_config_for_path() to make
>it more generic. So it can return a GKeyFile instance or something similar
>instead of hard-coded argument list.Then, this can be put in libfm core.
>By making this generic, any GUI implementor can read/write some config
>values associated with the folder easily. Libfm does not need to know the
>meaning of the key-value pairs. It just provides APIs to access them.

    Not bad idea. Though the work with config file itself is only about
1/4 of the implementation, and 3/4 of implementation is retrieving of the
values (config reader does not know meaning as you said) and applying of
them to the widgets.

>How to interpret the values is the job of pcmanfm and pcmanfm-qt.
>The APIs may looks like the following:

>FmFolderConfig* fm_path_dup_folder_config(FmPath* path);
>char* fm_folder_config_get_value(FmFolderConfig*, const char* key);
>void fm_folder_config_set_value(FmFolderConfig*, const char* key, const
>char* value);
>void fm_folder_config_save(FmFolderConfig* config);
>void fm_folder_config_ref(FmFolderConfig* config);
>void fm_folder_config_unref(FmFolderConfig* config);

>FmFolderConfig is a key-value dictionary object representing folder
>specific config values. Implementors of the GUIs can use this object to
>access folder-specific config values by keys they defined.
>Inside FmFolderConfig, this can be implemented easily using GKeyFile.
>This is more extensible and flexible. Also, the APIs are still useful
>outside pcmanfm.

    Well, it is possible to get any value as string. But we should to
implement all the parsing and validation (which is implemented in the
GKeyFile APIs) in the application, those parsers are static functions so
cannot be reused outside of GKeyFile. That will be a lot much code than
we move into such "optimization API". Yes, that approach will greatly
increase volume of the code in pcmanfm instead of reducing it. :(
    Real reduce (not a big though) will be if we implement all of that in
the LibFM so that FmFolderConfig will be reimplementation of GKeyFile
with all of the appropriate APIs (such as fm_folder_config_get_boolean(),
fm_folder_config_set_strings_list() and so on) and with some required
optimizations for flexibility. In fact, I already thought about GKeyFile
replacement due to its limitations and low efficiency.
    Unfortunately I have not enough time to write such implementation
into LibFM right now, I want to make pcmanfm into beta before Christmas
and let it possible to make a final release before freeze of Ubuntu LTS.
Let make it later then. I'm sorry.

    With best regards.
    Andriy.