Debarshi's den

Google Drive and GNOME: 6 years later

with 25 comments

GNOME 3.18 is going to be another milestone in our journey to bring various online services closer to the desktop, but this is one that took us 6 years to reach. You can now access your Google Drive through your favourite GNOME applications and the usual GIO APIs

Thibault Saunier started working on this way back in 2009 as a Google Summer of Code project. I picked it up a year ago, and after a few hiccups along the way and some head scratching — more on that later — it is finally here for you to enjoy. You can either wait for distributions like Fedora Workstation 23 to ship GNOME 3.18, or try the 3.17.92 release candidate tarballs that are coming out next week.

google-drive-pictures-hanko

google-drive-documents-gnome

Thanks to Alexander Larsson, Philip Withnall and Ondrej Holy for the endless discussions, code reviews and testing for the last one year.

Written by Debarshi Ray

10 September, 2015 at 11:22

25 Responses

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  1. This is simply awesome! Nice! 🙂

    Kris Thomsen

    10 September, 2015 at 12:41

  2. Excellent news and well done! Will definitely try this out when it comes to Debian testing.

    Björn Harrtell

    10 September, 2015 at 13:15

  3. Truly good news for desktop users. Thanks!

    Antonis Karagiannis

    10 September, 2015 at 16:14

  4. […] appena descritta, che con GNOME 3.18 potrebbe finalmente cambiare: si, perché stando a quanto dichiara Deharshi Ray – sviluppatore di GNOME impegnato su questo frangente – nella […]

  5. […] appena descritta, che con GNOME 3.18 potrebbe finalmente cambiare: si, perché stando a quanto dichiara Deharshi Ray – sviluppatore di GNOME impegnato su questo frangente – nella prossima release del […]

  6. Good work, and good patience. 🙂

    Philip

    10 September, 2015 at 20:56

  7. Can this be compiled and ran without tracker?

    Markus Rathgeb

    10 September, 2015 at 21:57

    • Tracker shouldn’t influence this at all. So, yes, it should work.

      Debarshi Ray

      10 September, 2015 at 22:43

  8. This has been an eagerly awaited feature. Thanks so much!!!
    BTW, Google drive has only been around for about three years (http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2012/04/introducing-google-drive-yes-really.html), so I assume the work has been towards rest based storage, in general.

    Liam Bulkley

    10 September, 2015 at 22:05

    • I would say database-based, not REST-based, but yes that was one part. The other was Google retiring their older API just after I picked it up. I will write about those in subsequent posts.

      Debarshi Ray

      10 September, 2015 at 22:45

    • The work done in 2009 was about Google Docs only, but in principal it was the same thing.

      Thibault Saunier

      10 September, 2015 at 23:40

  9. Thanks for that Debarshi!

    Thibault Saunier

    10 September, 2015 at 23:40

  10. […] “GNOME 3.18 is going to be another milestone in our journey to bring various online services closer to the desktop, but this is one that took us six years to reach. You can now access your Google Drive through your favourite GNOME applications, and the usual GIO APIs  Thibault Saunier started working on this way back in 2009 as a Google Summer of Code project. I picked it up a year ago, and after a few hiccups along the way and some head scratching – more on that later – it is finally here for you to enjoy,” wrote developer Debarshi Ray. […]

  11. […] 开发者Debarshi Ray在博客中写到: […]

  12. Any ideas why it shows files as size 0 bytes?

    Craig Cabrey

    11 September, 2015 at 06:05

    • At the moment libgdata only parses the quotaUsed field from the JSON, which is 0 for shared items that are not part of your Drive. We need to also parse fileSize and add API to access it.

      Debarshi Ray

      11 September, 2015 at 07:22

  13. How does it handle Docs/Sheets/Slides? Are they read-only libreoffice-compatible copies? Are they just fancy hyperlinks to the online version?

    thomasvs (@thomasvs)

    11 September, 2015 at 06:37

    • Clicking a Drive-specific file will open it in the web browser. Internally in GIO they are represented as a G_FILE_TYPE_SHORTCUT, and if you copy them locally they become a link-type desktop file. I need to investigate the behaviour of offline sync clients in this regard.

      Debarshi Ray

      11 September, 2015 at 07:20

  14. […] 3.18, which will be released on September 23, features integrated Google Drive support in the file manager and other GNOME […]

  15. […] 3.18, which will be released on September 23, features integrated Google Drive support in the file manager and other GNOME […]

  16. […] 3.18, that will be expelled on Sep 23, facilities integrated Google Drive support in a record manager and other GNOME […]

  17. […] 3.18, which will be released on September 23, features integrated Google Drive support in the file manager and other GNOME […]

  18. […] After years of Google promising and then letting the Linux community down, GNOME has finally taken matters into its own hands and as of GNOME 3.18 will feature Google Drive integration. […]

  19. […] source che porterà nuove features a partire dal supporto per Google Drive.Gli sviluppatori GNOME hanno annunciato nei giorni scorsi l‘arrivo del supporto per Google Drive nella futura versione 3.18, […]

  20. […] source che porterà nuove features a partire dal supporto per Google Drive. Gli sviluppatori GNOME hanno annunciato nei giorni scorsi l‘arrivo del supporto per Google Drive nella futura versione 3.18, […]