GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 518652
Places/Bookmark inconsistency and general weirdness
Last modified: 2008-03-05 23:31:20 UTC
Two main problems here: 1.) The way how mounts appear in the places bar when using (for example) network shares is quite anoying 2.) The Places list is even more inconstant with the file choosers's places list than before. I will attach a screenshot and explain a bit more from there...
Created attachment 105920 [details] Screenshot
Here are the problems one by one: 1.) Nautilus shows optical media (and I guess other addon memory devices) while the file chooser does not. Maybe this is due to me not running the HAL backend? 2.) Nautilus is missing the "Network Servers" place the file chooser has. Would be very useful to have IMHO. 3.) Because of 2., I added network:/// as a bookmark. This works, but it will lead to a duplicate network entry in the file chooser. Also, the network bookmark only turns tu use the right icon after it is pressed once, before it is just a normal folder. In the chooser, it displays as a network mount, strange. 4.) Mounts are added to the top section below optical media. After half an hour of usage I ended up with 4 entries I would not use anymore that day. If I needed the mounts very often, I would do bookmarks... like I did with "Uni". I would do the same for those 3 SMB mounts. Imagine someone browsing a large windows network, the places bar will soon fill with dozens of mounts which the user has to all close manually: not very nice. 5.) The SFTP mount itself is even more useless then the SMB mounts: The "Uni" bookmark takes me to a subfolder (/home/.......) on the server. The "sftp on linux.uni-koblenz" mount only takes me to the root, which is not helpful at all. 6.) SFTP mounts show in the file chooser, while SMB mounts do not... why? I don't see how SFTP mounts are different from SFTP for gvfs. To clarify: I don't want *any* mou8nt to be displayed in the chooser. 6.) Pressing "Uni" in nautilus takes me to the correct location. Pressing "sftp on linux.uni-koblenz" takes me to the server root, but misses the path. If used from a file chooser, things are different *again*: the "Uni" bookmark works fine, but the "Uni" mount (note yet another name!) takes me to my home directory on the server. Yay for consistency :(
So, what would the solution look like? - add a "Network Servers" place like the file chooser has - Don't display mounts. Perhaps as a preference? Also to consider would be a gnome-vfs like behaviour that would unmount automatically when the window of the mount is closed, which would be a sane behaviour in most cases, as users don't really need to know about "mounts" at all (one of the number one confusing things first time users will be confused about on linux) - Bookmarks could change the icon or display a small overlay icon if "mounted". There should also be a way to auto-mount a location if nautilus starts and perhaps an option to keep a mount active for the session after it was first mounted. Both option could be displayed in a context menu and/or properties window for a given bookmark.
This one is outdated, too. Some backend stuff has changed and I was not aware of the gio filechooser backend, which is closer to nautilus. The remaining problems can be sorted out by bug 520633. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 520633 ***