Re: Proposal: gnome-user-share

[Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>]

On Wed, 2004-12-01 at 16:44, Peter Williams wrote:
> On Wed, 2004-12-01 at 16:00 -0600, Shaun McCance wrote:
> > The one thing that scares me about this is the possibility of filling up
> > the hard drive with files a user can't see.  I decide I hate everything
> > I've been writing and delete my ~/Documents folder, which is actually a
> > symlink to ~/.Documents, though I don't know that.  The link is deleted,
> > but the dot directory is still there, eating up drive space with files I
> > thought I'd deleted.
> >
> > Of course, it's not an insurmountable problem.  Some special-casing of
> > deletion in Nautilus would do the trick.  But it's something we should
> > keep in mind if we go this route.
> 
> Is it even that much of a problem? Probably the only users who are going
> to delete Documents/Pictures/Downloads are the ones who never use them
> anyway, so there won't be a lot of big files remaining hidden.

Not the biggest problem in the world, but it's one worth considering,
particularly considering how simple the solution would be.  Imagine a
user who decides the time is finally ripe to rerip all his music in Ogg
Vorbis.  He deletes ~/Music and gets ripping.

And ~/Downloads is, by nature, temporary storage.  I could easily see a
user downloading a 600MB ISO, burning it, and then deleting ~/Downloads.

> And, as always, disk space is cheap.

No, it really isn't.  "Disk space is cheap" is a fine excuse for not
compressing every data file, or for having persistent caches.  It's not
a good excuse to leave files around that the user can't reasonably find
and delete.  That's like saying memory leaks are fine, because RAM is
cheap.

My ~/Music folder has over 100GB of data.  That is not the kind of disk
space I want to just lose because "disk space is cheap".

--
Shaun