Re: Desktop

[Roberto Zunino <zunino cli di unipi it>]

On Fri, 11 Feb 2000, Loban Rahman wrote:

> 
> Is the .gnome-desktop directory periodically rescanned, or only when
> something is dragged onto it? It ought to be the latter in my opinion

You mean the former (periodical rescan)?

> because the contents of .gnoem-desktop could be changed by not dragging
> something into it (e.g. copying somthing directly into the folder, or
> maybe a link becomes invalid from valid or vice versa, etc), and it ought
> to reflect the change.

This applies to directories as well.

The problem is that the only portable way to do this is to continuously
recan the directory (every 2 sec. for example).
BTW, this is how Windows does it. I have been told that OS/2 does the same
thing, and I'd bet the Mac does too.

Rescanning isn't the "Right Way" to go IMHO and I believe most programmers
share my view. This is because rescanning shouldn't be necessary from a
"theoretical" point of view and beacuse it can be expensive: consider a
gmc/nautilus/etc. window displaying /usr/bin, /dev or another dir with
more than 1000 files. Consider 10 windows displaying 10 "big" folders,
too. And what about NFS ?

<disclaimer>
If you had ever looked at my home page
(http://www.cli.di.unipi.it/~zunino) you'd have expected a similar
answer from me. If I liked rescanning/polling I hadn't written that ugly
patch to linux 2.2.13 that lets you poll() a directory in order to wait
for changes :-)
</disclaimer>

Zun.