Please can we get a consistent desktop neutral trash behaviour.

[Lex Hider <floss lex hider name>]

Hi,

I'd like to preface my remarks by saying that I make them as a user and
not a developer. I also am not making them from a kde or gnome
perspective, but as a user who is caught in the middle.

I have long been annoyed and perplexed by the different behaviours of
deleting files in "gnome" and "kde" apps. The gnome delete action will
put the file in ~/.Trash, the kde delete action will put to
~/.local/share/Trash . Neither destination is visible to the other, i.e.
looking at trash via nautilus doesn't see files in .local, looking at
trash in konqueror doesn't see files in .Trash .

I never understood why this was the case, other than to know it's a
*major* usability issue.

I'd like to point this isn't just an issue of the respective file
managers (although note that xfce's thunar and konqueror are completely
compatible with respect to trash).
For example, deleting a song via rhythmbox and amarok will end up in
different places.

I had assumed that there were 2 independent solutions to the same
problem. Realising that kde4 will arrive before gnome3, I made a
suggestion on the relevant kde list that they should adopt the gnome
solution since they will be first project able to make major changes to
their platform.

http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.comp.kde.devel.general/49400

>From what I could understand, the answer was that gnome isn't compatible
with the freedesktop trash spec.

http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Specifications/trash-spec

Here come the questions!

Why does gnome put files in .Trash instead of .local/ ?
Is the gnome trash implementation compatible with the above spec?
Is there any reason the project couldn't adopt the .local behaviour?
Is there any reason this couldn't be achieved for gnome 2.22?
Should I file a bug regarding this? What component would I file against?

* USE CASE EXAMPLE *

Dave has always been a gnome user, but he does think amarok is linux's
killer app for audio. He listens to all his podcasts and large music
collection with amarok and uses the program to delete albums he no
longer needs. Unfortunately due to the incompatible behaviour, Dave has
multiple gigabytes of wasted disk space that he doesn't know about
in .local, even though nautilus tells him his trash is empty.

http://xfce-diary.blogspot.com/2006/07/trash-is-back.html

Cheers,

Lex.

-- 
Lex Hider <floss lex hider name>