desktop provider (was "Re: abstract paths")

[Alan Bateman]

Mark Thornton wrote:
> I think there are instances of File such that
>    new File(f.toString())
> is not equal to the original file 'f' (and in fact doesn't work at 
> all). JFileChooser can return such objects on Windows. These files 
> represent paths based on locations like "My Documents". Windows has 
> never defined a programmatic string form for these paths. It would be 
> rather useful if we had a way to obtain such 'roots' as Paths (as the 
> actual underlying location can vary; i.e. "My Documents" isn't always 
> called that).
Someday it would be great to have a "desktop provider" that uses the 
shell API and handles the various desktop/shell concepts like this. It 
would delegate to the default provider for actual access to the file 
system. A desktop file system could treat these special shell folders as 
root directories, it could handle short cuts, it could allow the 
progress of copy/move operations to be monitored, map content types to 
icons, etc. It would be great to find a volunteer for this.

-Alan.