[Pipet Devel] Proposal for implementing permanent storage

[Brad Chapman]

Hello all;
    I've been working in the middle on adding capabilities for 
"permanent storage" of loci, so that they can be saved in one session 
and recalled in a different session. I think this will be really 
important to have working if we want to have good functionality with 
the new merger with GMS and Overflow. So, I've come up with a proposal 
for implementing permanent storage in the GUI and would like to toss 
it out for people's comments before I get going with it (since I'm not 
so hot at user interfaces). I think this is pretty much based on ideas 
that Jeff posted previously. So here goes.

1. The permanent storage locus will be a "special case" of the 
container locus that we currently have. That is, the locus will look 
like the current container locus with a list/tree view of the contents.

1.1 For anyone who looks at the code, I'm planning on implementing 
this as a new class since I'm not really very happy with how I did 
widgets/container.py. Then I'll revamp these classes so one either 
inherets from another or (more likely) so they both inheret from a 
base class.

1.2 Each element in a list will be represented by the name of the 
locus and a little pixmap according to it's type. Anyone know where to 
get a bunch o' little pixmaps I could use for this?

1.3 The permanent storage locus will have to be special in that it is 
either always present on the desktop, or can be called up through a 
menu function.

2. The permanent storage locus will be implemented like a "separate 
hard drive" from the rest of the workspace. So anything which moves 
into permanent storage will be copied in, and anything that moves out 
will be copied out.

3. loci will be moved out of permanent storage onto a workspace (so 
they can be used or manipulated) via drag and drop (like things work 
now for normal containers).

4. loci will be moved into containers via drag and drop from a locus 
in the workspace. Right now I'm planning to implement a dnd from a 
locus on the workspace using a button 2 click (the middle button for 3 
button mouse users and buttons 1 + 2 for 2 button users). Then we can 
explore further how to integrate dnd movement with the "regular local 
loci movement" and get how we'd work that straightened out.

5. I'm not positive the best way to view deeper levels of directories 
inside of the storage container. We could do this using:
    a. A GtkTree (like I had originally implemented for regular 
containers). I
_might_ be able to make this faster on a second try.
    b, Make a double click on a container in the directory open up a 
window/another loci that displays the contents on this directory.
    c. Other ideas?

6. We will probably also need to implement a "trash" container to go 
along with this.

    I think that's what I've got for now. Any suggestions or comments 
would be very welcome!

Brad