Re: Trash system

[Ryan Muldoon <rpmuldoon students wisc edu>]

I'm glad to see that people are interested in working on this issue!

> Well, this is really interesting. You've thought a lot about the actual Trash
> location and not really about the metadata, and the Corel guys have a
> working solution to suggest for the metadata, and not much on the Trash
> location yet :-) Sounds like a good opportunity to exchange solutions and
> make a standard out of the result.
> 
> This is how it works now in CFM (Corel's file manager), and how it
> will soon work in KDE:
> 
> - Each user has her own Trash directory (in ~/Desktop/Trash).
> [Note: I suggest the desktop icon to be just a link, and the actual trash
> location to be more elaborate, using the same solution as Nautilus's].
> 
Sounds good to me....

> - "Move To Trash" menu item appears in the CFM. When it is invoked, a
> new trash entry is created for every item moved. First, the unique
> 9-character name is generated (starting with dot, then 8 random characters, 
> then checked for non-duplicated entry). Then a directory with that name 
> is created in ~/Desktop/Trash, and the file or folder in question is moved 
> into that directory. Then ".info" is appended to the name
> above and file with that name is created in ~/Desktop/Trash.
> 
> This file has the following structure:
>     <original location>
>     <date deleted in hex>
>     <File size>
>     <File mode>
>     <mtime of the original file in hex>
>     <ctime of the original file in hex>
> with every element appearing on its own line.
> 
> Here's a an example.
> If we move to trash file "/home/Corelcorp/PeterG/test.gif", then it
> could end up in "/home/PeterG/Desktop/Trash/.t49SxmLt/test.gif",
> and the file "/home/PeterG/Desktop/.t49SxmLt.info" will look
> something like:
> 
> /home/PeterG/test.gif
> 39f8b197
> 9034
> 81ed
> 39aa71aa
> 39aa9cec
> 
> 
How would moving a directory to the trash be handled?  (Especially if it has
a bunch of files/subdirs)  This makes sense in the single-file situation though.
Also, it seems to me like it would be cleaner if the deleted files and their
metadata files were all contained nicely in the same directory.  Is there a 
reason why this would be a bad idea?  

> Well, if CFM, Konqueror and Nautilus use the same trash locations and
> the same way of putting files into it (info files with the same format),
> they will be perfectly integrated and compatible at this level.
> 

It would be great to see if we could get other FM people on board with this
process as well.....like those responsible for EFM, etc.  The more consistency,
the better.  As I mentioned before, it might be nice to try and get CLI tools
to respect whatever standard we come up with here, once we get it at the 
desktop level.


    --Ryan