Planning FileChooser portal implementation with nautilus

[ebassi (Emmanuele Bassi)]

@antoniof

Instead, my working hypothesis is we don’t need to have the portal implementation in xdg-desktop-portal-gnome and can do the whole portal implementation (executable, D-bus method handling, parenting) in the nautilus codebase. I assume installing a nautilus.portal file and changing gnome-portals.conf to prefer the nautilus implementation would be enough to make it work.

I’d rather much prefer this solution, as it avoids exposing a weird, semi-private, unstable API.

@antoniof

xdg-desktop-portal-gnome could probably drop its FileChooser implementation, if we assume nautilus is available in GNOME, as xdg-desktop-portal-gtk is already acting as fallback.

Yes; once Nautilus acts as the file selection portal we can drop the FileChooser portal implementation inside the GNOME portal. The GTK portal already acts as the “portal of last resort”, so non-GNOME environments can always fall back to a file selection implementation. Additionally, users can configure xdg-desktop-portal through the portals.conf file, and add their own preferred backend for the file selection portal, if they don’t want to use Nautilus.