Re: File manager tree.

[James Henstridge <james daa com au>]

In explorer under windows, you will find that it puts a [+] sign next to
every directory on networked filesystems.  It only checks to see if it was
appropriate to have it there when you try clicking on the expander (that
is, if there were no subdirectories then the [+] sign disapears).

For slow filesystems/large directories, this can make quite a difference.
So even explorer makes this sort of optimisations.

James.

--
Email: james@daa.com.au
WWW:   http://www.daa.com.au/~james/


On Fri, 28 May 1999, Miguel de Icaza wrote:

> 
> Hello guys,
> 
>    So I fixed the bug people were reporting with the file manager tree
> for displaying incorrect data.  But this is not an optimal solution.
> 
>    The problem is as follows:
> 
>        1. The Windows-like feature of the tree in the file manager is
>           that you get a little square next to each directory which
>           can be empty for directories that do not contain any
>           subdirectories or a box with a plus sign, if the directory
>           contains subdirectories.
> 
> 	  If you have a plus sign ([+]) and click on it, it converts
> 	  to a [-] icon and opens the tree.
> 
> 	  This is a nice feature.
> 
>        2. Slow file systems are all over the place in Unix.  They
>           appear on the most unusual places: special directories might
>           refer to remote servers (afs, dfs), arbitrary locations can
>           be slow (NFS /users), or special vfs places (/#smb/ for
>           server listings).
> 
>     The big problem here is that in order to achieve (1) you need to
> do a 2-level scan of the directories: one pass to scan all the names
> returned and stat the thing to figure out if the name is a directory,
> or if it is a file (ie, if it is a subdirectory, we need to scan the
> child to see if it has directories, in that case, we need to stick a
> [+] sign there).
> 
>    So, I would like to get rid of nice-feature-on-point-1.  It is
> nice, yes, but it makes all sorts of people upset because they can not
> use the file manager on their systems.
> 
>    Is there any objections to me removing the [+] feature from the
> file manager?
> 
> Miguel.
>