Ability to set AFS permissions from Nautilus

[jdreed]

I don't know how extensible Nautilus is, but it would be awesome if I could right-click on a folder in AFS and set AFS permissions graphically. Yes, this is a pony.

[andersk]

Instance: nautilus Time: Sun Mar 29 02:23:54 2009 Host: VINEGAR-POT.MIT.EDU
From: Anders Kaseorg <andersk>

Did you ever look at /usr/share/doc/python-nautilus/examples ?  It
looks totally easy.

[broder]

Ugh. Luckily for us, we get to deal with 2 API versions already:

--- nautilus-python-0.5.1.orig/debian/NEWS
+++ nautilus-python-0.5.1/debian/NEWS
@@ -0,0 +1,7 @@
+nautilus-python (0.5.0-1) experimental; urgency=low
+
+  * This version of nautilus-python requires Nautilus 2.22.  Because there
+    have been API/ABI changes, the extension directory has changed to
+    /usr/lib/nautilus/extension-2.0/python.
+
+ -- Ross Burton <ross@debian.org>  Sun, 20 Apr 2008 16:43:55 +0100

[jdreed]

A proof-of-concept is in /mit/jdreed/src/nautilus-afs. It uses Evan's pyafs.

Details are in README, things to do are in TODO

You can do pretty much anything you can do with "fs sa" and "fs la".

It will display negative ACLs, but won't yet allow you to edit them.

[jdreed]

Screenshot

[andersk]

Why is “Show Negative ACLs” an optional checkbox? I think it should just show negative ACLs by default. (Perhaps as “-rlidwka” or “-negative rlidwka” so that the red color isn’t the only cue.)

[jdreed]

Because you can easily shoot yourself in the foot with negative ACLs, and frankly the average user never uses them or needs them. My initial thought when writing it was "If you know what negative ACLs are, then you know how to use "fs sa" which will be faster than using nautilus anyway."

However, that's obviously incompatible with the idea of this being something easily adapted to other sites.

*shrug*. I'll probably remove the checkbox and instead have it yell loudly if the user appears to be giving themselves negative ACLs, similar to how it yells loudly if you're about to remove yourself from an ACL.

Moving milestone to summer, since this actually exists now.

[andersk]

Replying to jdreed:

Because you can easily shoot yourself in the foot with negative ACLs, and frankly the average user never uses them or needs them.

And the user won’t see them if they aren’t there. But if they _are_ there, it seems like a good idea to point that out. How does hiding a negative ACL that is already there help to stop anyone from shooting themselves in the foot? And if they are not there, then the presence of a checkbox that does nothing is only distracting.

(I don’t care as much whether this GUI has the ability to create or edit negative ACLs.)

[jdreed]

We're not going to make it for the fall, because we also need to deploy and package pyafs.

[jdreed]

This is pretty much never going to happen.

[jdreed]

I'm going to rewrite this in Gtk3 and just use "subprocess" until we can deal.

[jdreed]

Built into -dev. debathena-workstation (1.8) is committed, but not yet built.