Find some way to ship Nautilus integration

[wjt]

Dropbox maintains https://github.com/dropbox/nautilus-dropbox – we obviously can't ship a (host) Nautilus extension from a Flatpak but it would be nice if the same functionality could be exposed. Revive libcloudproviders, write a Dropbox backend based on that (GPL 3) code and ship that D-Bus service?

[nmusatti]

Would it be possible to choose which file browser to open based on availability? I'm asking because I'd be interested in the MATE variant being used: https://github.com/mate-desktop/caja-dropbox .

[wjt]

Well, it's not possible to ship the extension at all at present.

I'm pretty sure Dropbox opens the file browser using xdg-open so whatever you set as your default should work.,

[ispanos]

@wjt is it something that may be possible in the future? What would be needed?

[wjt]

It will never be possible for the Dropbox Flatpak to include a plugin for Nautilus running on the host system.

What would be needed would be to integrate Dropbox with the libcloudproviders API. I don't know the details of that API. You might be able to adapt the nautilus-dropbox code to do that, talking to the Dropbox daemon over its custom IPC protocol and in effect translating that to the libcloudproviders DBus API.