On Tue 31 Dec 2024 at 07:34:20 (+1100), George at Clug wrote: > In Debian Bookworm installations, why is gvfs-backends and gvfs-fuse > not installed by default when installing Debian with XFCE?
Because gvfs will function without those backends, so it would be against policy to depend on those packages. OTOH gvfs-daemons appears to be a dependency, and includes a minimal set of backends. > For network browsing in the thunar file manager, install gvfs-backends > and gvfs-fuse, and add your users to the "fuse" group (sudo adduser > fuse). > What is the issue of not having these two packages installed? The package descriptions tell you: "This package contains the afc, afp, archive, cdda, dav, dnssd, ftp, gphoto2, http, mtp, network, sftp, smb and smb-browse backends." and "This package contains the gvfs-fuse server that exports gvfs mounts to all applications using FUSE." > But when try to add my userid to the fuse group, I discover that the > fuse group does not exist, why is this? Because there's no need for it as /dev/fuse has been read/writeable since jessie; and no one has updated the wiki. > I think I found the "fuse" package was not installed. Should I install > the fuse package? > # apt install fuse3 I don't understand: fuse and fuse3 aren't the same package. I see that gvfs-fuse depends on fuse3, so I assume fuse won't work. > I then created the fuse group and added my userid to the fuse group. > Is this correct? Is doing this a problem? Does creating the fuse > group and adding the userid to the group actually help? > > # groupadd fuse > # adduser fuse I don't think there's any harm in your creating random groups for fun :) > With the popularity of XFCE, I would have expected that "network > browsing in the thunar file manager" would be fully supported by > default by now. Is there a reason it is not? My guess is there must > be some policy related reason. No idea. Maybe the answer is at https://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php?t=157776 and maybe not. I don't use gvfs, so most of the information above comes from reading the package files. Cheers, David.
