Hello Thunar maintainers,

please consider recommending gvfs-backends in from Thunar. AFAICT, in a
default xfce4 installation, Thunar displays the "Browse Network"
(network://) area in its sidebar, but lacks the backends to actually
open it (message 'Failed to open "/ on ".' / 'The specified location is
not supported').

If you deem gvfs-backends too heavyweight for an XFCE4 desktop (I
counted 9 new packages on a almost fresh install: libcdio-...,
libgdata..., libgoa..., libnfs8, liboauth0, psmisc), please let me know
and I'd rephrase this as a bug against gvfs-backends, "please provide a
gvfs-backends-light" or similar (at least SSHFS and WebDAV are IMO
reasonably to be expected from a network-enabled distribution).

Other alternatives I'd see is giving a more descriptive error message
with installation instructions (of whose difficulties to get it right
upstream and cross-distribution I'm aware, thus my initial suggestion),
or hiding the network area completely when not supported.

Thanks for maintaining Thunar
chrysn

Control: tag -1 patch

The patch below is also attached.


From fca20c4a1d15b0d8d4e8a5760d36892349d9b243 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: Geert Stappers <geert.stappers@hendrikx-itc.nl>
Date: Wed, 22 Aug 2018 15:29:16 +0200
Subject: [PATCH] recommending gvfs-backends

As requested/suggested
in https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=876178#5
---
 debian/control | 1 +
 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+)

diff --git a/debian/control b/debian/control
index 6558f71..b1137d8 100644
--- a/debian/control
+++ b/debian/control
@@ -60,6 +60,7 @@ Depends: desktop-file-utils,
          ${shlibs:Depends}
 Recommends: default-dbus-session-bus | dbus-session-bus,
             gvfs,
+            gvfs-backends,
             policykit-1-gnome | polkit-1-auth-agent,
             thunar-volman [linux-any],
             tumbler,

bugreport is now open for almost two years, in two days exactly two years.

a patch is one year old.


What will happen with this issue?

Hi,

sorry noone replied sooner (I seem to remember a different issue where this
was discussed, but can't remember which one right now). I'm a bit reluctant to
add the recommends because last time I checked gvfs-backends brought a lot of
dependencies and it's not really useful for browsing local filesystems.

Having it installed by default and forcing bizarre backends on all users
systems is not nice,

Also, gvfs by itself only Suggests it, which look like the right thing to do.

Regards,

Still impacts 4.18.4-1, although perhaps the bug should be against something gio related, or even tasksel or debian-installer?

I ran into this when running through the Debian Installer and selecting XFCE as part of tasksel. Perhaps that task should bring in gvfs-backends?

"Failed to browse the network" comes from https://gitlab.xfce.org/xfce/thunar/-/blob/master/thunar/thunar-window.c?ref_type=heads#L4731 but the "Location not supported" doesn't seem to be in that codebase.

Thanks,
Adam