Unfortunately, my contributions to various projects have been limited over the last months given the various coronavirus-related restrictions. Also, I took over gnome-autoar maintainership recently on which I spent some time. So GVfs doesn’t bring as much news as I would like, but there are some which are worth mentioning.
Google Shared Drives and Shared with me
Definitely, the biggest changes happened in the Google backend. It is now possible to browse files on Shared Drives (formerly Team Drives). Also, support for the Shared with me folder was added. So it is possible to browse files that are shared with the user but not added to his drive. These two features were merged together with various smaller bug fixes and improvements.

SFTP supports two-factor authentication
It is now possible to access SFTP shares, which are guarded by two-factor authentication. This was not possible earlier, the backend hanged during the mount procedure and the connection timeouted. Currently, two password prompts should be shown instead.
Possibility to disable trash
In some cases, the trash support is not desired, for example on shared mounts, or for automounted locations. Now, the x-gvfs-notrash
mount option can be used, which causes that the gvfsd-trash
daemon ignores that mount and the g_file_trash()
function returns an error. This is actually already part of GNOME 3.38, but I didn’t make a separate post for that release.
In the end, I would like to thank all who made some contributions during this cycle even small ones, especially to all newcomers.
As Google Drive basically is a tags-based structure (files can be at multiple “locations”), is there any support for this? Or sharing options? I’m just curious as I had my own fun with the Google Drive API some years ago.
Yes and no, the backend doesn’t allow you to create files with multiple parents, but it is aware of them and handles them differently in various cases. The good news is that Google stepped away from this feature: https://developers.google.com/drive/api/v3/ref-single-parent. The bad news is that the newly introduced shortcuts are not yet handled as symlinks.
A similar situation is with the shared files. The backend is aware of them and handles them differently, but you can’t change sharing options over Nautilus resp. GVfs. This is rather something for some dedicated application or Nautilus extensions.
The backend also supports multiple files with the same title in one folder. But all of the mentioned makes the backend extremely complicated and not much usable with applications, which don’t use GIO API directly.
Ah, thanks for your response. I didn’t know of the single parent change. That will simplify handling files a lot. And I didn’t really expect sharing to work in Nautilus. Even Dropbox didn’t have support for this and they support Nautilus since … basically forever?
Thanks for your work, looking forward to more blog posts 🙂
I just wanna say a big thank you for implementing Google Drive Shared Folder support. We use this a lot nowadays in our company and I prefer the Nautilus integration over e.g. Insync. I was already tempted to give it a try myself, but never found the time 😉