Gmailfs front-end, gnome-mount documentation

[shirish]

Hi all,
          First some background info. Gmailfs is basically using your
gmail account as a filesystem. I've been trying to use gmailfs on
ubuntu gutsy for the past 12 hrs. without success. Please note that
I'm cross-posting this both as the package is both in debian  as well
as ubuntu. As Sebastian Delafond is the official maintainer of the
package also ccing him.

First the package in question :-

http://packages.debian.org/unstable/utils/gmailfs in debian
https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gmailfs in ubuntu

Homepage of Gmail filesystem :-
http://richard.jones.name/google-hacks/gmail-filesystem/gmail-filesystem-implementation.html

First of all the frustrations I have had with gmailfs can be seen here
https://answers.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gmailfs/+question/11592/

Of course the answer may be some option or something which I've not
tried to do & hopefully will be known/sorted out in short period of
time, but the larger picture is I'm not happy with the current
scenario as it takes the user to know quite a bit of knowledge of how
mount works & stuff.

I lack the skill to implement whatever I'm going to outline but if
somebody has the drive or the motivation to apply it please do so. I
ran this idea by the upstream author & while he thinks its a good idea
but would rather if somebody else made that gtk+ dialog boxes.

Now the actual thing, right now if one installs gmailfs one needs to
do a man mount.gmailfs, read the instructions, see if he is able to
make sense & know where /etc/fstab is put the stuff there as it is &
hope it works or do the same in the CLI & hope that works.

Now for a second please assume I know nothing about mount points and
what they are. I just know that there are some apps. which I can
install from synaptic & they work out of box. Gmailfs doesn't .

What could make it better?

Perhaps you (somebody from the community) could make a gtk front-end
dialog box so after installing gmailfs invokes mount.gmailfs which in
turn invokes the gtk front-end and says it needs superuser or root
privileges, then the dialog-box gives example of what a mount point is
etc and a place to fill in, username & password & whatever else is
required. It would make gmailfs more usable. Have no idea either way
if and any security implications are as of now and after having the
dialog box.

Another tool which people use to do mount is gnome-mount atleast on
the GNOME/GTK side, the description for gnome-mount is
Description :- wrapper for (un)mounting and ejecting storage devices

Looking for comments, suggestions & possibly somebody coming forward &
doing an actual implementation of it. If this has been discussed
before or if this is not the proper mailing list (as the package is
something which is the universe repository) please feel free to guide
me the same.
-- 
          Shirish Agarwal
  This email is licensed under http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/

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