Been working closely with Johan Dahlin of PyGTK fame to get his
python-method gnome-fs bindings in good shape, so I could start
writing a Gnome VFS Module for Plone Desktop using only Python.

We had lots of issues to keep us busy in the last couple days,
including fighting the GIL (no, not the Brazilian Culture Minister,
but the nasty Global Interpreter Lock). Well, it’s actually not bad,
but jumping back and forth between the GTK mainloop and the GIL is not
exactly fun.

Anyway, after spending quite some time on this, and learning more
about C and Python bindings that in my wildest dreams, we finally got
something working. It’s actually insanely cool, because most of the
nastyness of dealing with WebDAV and caching is being handled by
RemoteResource, which is the core of Plone Desktop, so the code
ended up being nice and clean.

So far, a good amount of operations are working. It’s possible to
create new files and directories, but not yet upload them. It’s
possible to remove files and directories, browse (obviously) and
rename, and it looks very speedy compared to the default WebDAV method
in Gnome VFS.

So, enough talking. Here’s a screenshot to tease you. Nothing
exceptionally different from the built-in WebDAV method so far, the
real meat will come when we can pass extra info from the VFS to
FileInfo, and access this extra info from the context menus and
property pages. Then it will be quite easy to finish this and get it
much closer to Plone Desktop on the Windows platform.

Don’t expect too much progress too soon though. I’m working on this on
my free time, which is not much these days. :)

BTW, this all started during PyConBrasil, which was by far the
coolest Python-related event I’ve been to. The lectures were
exceptionally high-level, and on the most incredible subjects. It’s
great to see we have such a cool community and that it’s thriving so
fast and furiously. Can’t wait for Osvaldo’s slides, which show a
steady growth both in number of participants and discussions in the
last 16 months. Also great was the pleasure to meet Gustavo
Niemeyer. Check out his blog, he’s also making a short summary of
the conference. Sadly, I forgot to thank him for his various
contributions to Python like DateUtil and the bzip2 module. Oh,
well, next time I will buy him some wine-powered beer.