File actions: Copy To does not work for directories

[William Friesen]

The File Actions plugin does not allow directories to be copied.
at kupfer/plugin/fileactions.py line 230

def valid_for_item(self, item):
 return (not item.is_dir()) and os.access(item.object, os.R_OK)

Is there a reason that directories are explicitly disallowed here?

[X (u78qir8a9-deactivatedaccount)]

yes, there is a reason. We simply use GIO for these file operations and when this was implemented, GIO did not do recursive directory copying. If it does now, we can add it in Kupfer. It's very beneficial to use GIO because of the complexities error handling, in my opinion.

[William Friesen (william-friesen)]

According to
http://www.pygtk.org/docs/pygobject/class-giofile.html#method-giofile--copy
GIO.File still can not handle recursive copies of directories.

Would it be ok to use shutil.copytree for this?
http://docs.python.org/library/shutil.html#shutil.copytree

[X (u78qir8a9-deactivatedaccount)]

I don't think it would be worth it to use shutil for this; it would be much less robust and we would need much more code for error handling; add to that the inconsistency with the other GIO-based file operations.

[X (u78qir8a9-deactivatedaccount)]

(On my wishlist is a program that we can delegate file operations to. It would be great if Copy To.. in Kupfer would simply start a normal nautilus file transfer; nautilus would have the implementation, show a progress dialog and allow cancelling etc as normal. This way of hooking into the normal programs of the desktop (compare file-roller) is superior.)

[William Friesen (william-friesen)]

https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=498506
shows that this functionality is being worked on, but nothing seems to have been committed yet.

[X (u78qir8a9-deactivatedaccount)]

Wonderful to see this added to Nautilus, thanks for the bug pointer. Now we just need to get hold of a new version of nautilus and make a plugin for it

[X (u78qir8a9-deactivatedaccount)]

FYI, Thunar 1.2 has these actions available in it's D-bus API and I have implemented Move/Copy to using Thunar in the thunar plugin that is going to be merged after this week's release. (You can use Thunar as a service, you don't need to use it as file manager). It's a step on the way.