Re: Baobab

[David Nielsen <david lovesunix net>]

ons, 26 07 2006 kl. 17:47 -0700, skrev Jeff Waugh:
> <quote who="Emmanuele Bassi">
> 
> > The GNOME Utilities package is a small package that GNOME has kept since
> > the 1.x era (and before); it provides some application other than baobab,
> > like the screenshoter, the file search dialog, the dictionary and the
> > system log viewer, that are not sufficiently big to warrant their own
> > package but at the same time are considered part of the basic offering of
> > GNOME itself.
> 
> I think Davyd's question was more about whether Baobab (or its function) is
> suitable to be considered part of the basic offering of GNOME itself. I am
> not convinced it should be there myself.

It's a nice little tool, however as the user only has access to a subset
of the data stored on the system representing data in the manner Baobab
does might not be the best option we have.

For me the only reason to use such a tool would be if I'm running out of
space and I need to find the best place to start the deleting.

Now it strikes me that the correct way to handle that use case is:

1) Available diskspace goes below a set limit*, libnotify me that I'm
running out of diskspace.
2) The system offers to clean out the trash for me
3) If I'm still not above the limit then we could present the user with
some suggestions for files in his homedir that he has never accessed to
be moved to tagged for removal.

This sounds dangerous but at least we know nobody ever touched them so
it might be safer than having him find big files with baobab without a
helpful suggestion and just deleting away. I've seen people remove
everything except the .exe file from applications on Windows to save
space, since that was all they used - much to their surprise it stopped
working.

Baobab on as a regular user makes little sense, as a sysadmin on a
system with a lot of users it would be very handy to spot which users
are storing a lot of irrelevant data in their homedir etc. 

I don't really think it has a place on a regular desktop, it would be
most welcome in a administration application set for GNOME along side
Sabayon, pessulus and most of gnome-system-tools though. 

* calculating this limit can be tricky, no one setting will ever hit the
mark for all cases. The reserved block feature in ext3 is a perfect
example of how not to do this.