[Afpfs-ng-devel] A more complete AFP client

[Alex d. <ale...@gm...>]

Martin Forsgren and I were having a side conversation, and I thought
I'd open the topic up to the whole list.

My goal is, ultimately, to make a finder for Linux.  afpfs-ng is just
one part of this.  There's a few different ways to do it, and I'm
thinking that I'd like to do this with gnome and nautilus.  But
there's certainly room for other implementations.

1. A browser

I think you get this with avahi-browse.

2. A gnome-vfs2 module

This would be able to handle afp:// URIs, and would be a wrapper
around afp_client, and talk directly to the mounted filesystem.

3. A nautilus extension

I'm not quite sure what kind of extension this is (I think maybe a
NautilusView), but it would be able to parse the meta information that
afpfs-ng presents as hidden files to the user.

In afpfs-ng (starting in 0.4, it was broken in 0.3),  the resource
fork for /foo/bar is in foo/bar/rsrc.  (for AFP 2.x, comments, APPLs
and icons will also available, but those are not the current focus).

With the help of a resource parsing library, you can dig up icons and
other strings related to any given file and represent them accordingly
in nautilus.  I spent a weekend writing the parser that extracts icons
from the resource fork, I had a problem finding any reasonable code
out there.

It took me some time to find anything to help remap the icons to PNG
files, that'll be another task.  We'd have to somehow map the various
sizes of icons to the ones that nautilus expects, and I can see that
being a bit painful.

So, that's my general plan.  What's yours?

- Alex