Re: Will symlinking fix trash bugs? (Was Re: Please can we get a consistent desktop neutral trash behaviour.)

[Alexander Larsson <alexl redhat com>]

On Wed, 2007-10-17 at 14:23 +0200, Christian Kirbach wrote:
> On Wed, 10 Oct 2007 10:03:10 +0200, Alexander Larsson <alexl redhat com>  
> wrote:
> 
> > On Fri, 2007-10-05 at 14:43 +1000, Lex Hider wrote:
> >> On Thu, 04 Oct 2007 14:46:05 +0100 Emmanuele Bassi <ebassi gmail com>  
> >> wrote:
> 
> >> > > >From what I could understand, the answer was that gnome isn't  
> >> compatible
> >> > > with the freedesktop trash spec.
> 
> >> Is the solution as simple as these 3 steps?
> >> 1) Identify which gnome apps can delete files.
> >> 2) Port the relevant deletion code from gnome-vfs to gio.
> >> 3) Intelligently migrate .Trash/ to .local/
> >
> > That should work, yes.
> > Making current gnome (w/ gnome-vfs) use the new trash spec is a rather
> > large change, since the trash code is rather spread out over the code
> 
> What about symlinks? I've just symlinked ~/.Trash to another folder and   
> successfully
> tested nautilus' trash functionality.
> We could make a helper application run once and move the contents of  
> ~/.Trash to
> ~/.local/share/Trash and then create a symlink. This will
> 
> (a) maintain compability with old apps
> (b) create a freedesktop.org compatible trashing system at the same time
> (c) not require any changes to nautilus or gnome-vfs (nor gvfs)
> 
> Then again distros could do this with scripts in software packages of  
> their preferred
> packaging system.
> They could also remove the ~/.Trash symlink when gnome-vfs is replaced by  
> gvfs.

This is not a good idea. The freedesktop trash system differs in other
ways from the current gnome system. For instance in the new system the
trash dir has a files/ subdirectory for the actual trashed files and a
info/ subdirectory for information about the trashed files (original
location, date of trashing). It also picks trash directories differently
for non-homedir trashing.