Try to use portals, and fall back on GTK

[iTrooz]

Hey !

Portals can be quite difficult to setup for users, which make it difficult for us to use it, but the native feeling is great for those who want it

Would it be possible to add a "build option" (or idk) to compile both portals and GTK implementations, and first try to use portals, and fallback on GTK popups ?

I'd be ready to help with that
Thanks !

[Bernard Teo]

Just to be sure I'm understanding you correctly, you want to have a check at runtime to decide whether to open a Portal or GTK dialog?

[iTrooz]

Yes. Sorry, re-reading myself, I realize that this was pretty badly written

The functions could be implemented on your side with something like this:
(pseudocode, I know your API isn't exactly like that)

nfdresult_t NFD::openFile(NFD::UniquePathU8 outPath) {
	result = NFD::Portal::openFile(outPath)
	if (result == NFD_ERROR) {
		return NFD::GTK::openFile(outPath)
	} else return result;
}

But It'd also be fine for me if NFD::Portal::openFile() and NFD::GTK::openFile() were simply exposed to us, and we had the responsibility to implement the fallback (right now we have to choose between them at compile time with NFD_PORTAL)

[Bernard Teo]

Thanks for the clarification.

It's a nice feature to have, and I'd be happy to accept a PR for such a feature (as long as it is possible at build time to select just a single implementation).

There's a different but related question, about whether it should be a hard loader error if the loader cannot find libdbus or libgtk at runtime. Your current proposal will be a hard error at load time, which I'm not sure is ideal. Preventing a hard loader error is usually achieved using dlopen() (as mentioned in mlabbe/nativefiledialog#42 and mlabbe/nativefiledialog#102), but it can probably be done more nicely on Linux by importing the functions from shared libraries as weak symbols (with #pragma weak or some attribute). This will allow you to run your binary even if one of libdbus or libgtk is missing. I'm not too sure whether such a distribution exists in practice though.