Copying behavior

[Marcus Bjurman <marbj499 student liu se>]

Hi,

I'm the developer of gnome-commander, a file manager that uses gnome-vfs 
for file handling. I'm sending this mail because I have found a problem 
in gnome-vfs that seems to confuse users of my app.

The problem is that gnome-vfs acts strange when copying one directory 
over another. I belive many users expects that the target directory will 
be patched with the content of the new one. Here is an example:

/tmp/foo contains foo1.txt
/tmp/tmp/foo contains foo1.txt & foo2.txt

When the user now copies /tmp/foo to /tmp/tmp/foo he expects foo1.txt to 
be replaced and foo2.txt should not be effected.

I first thought that it was an easy to make it like that, if the program 
always returns 'skip' in the async_xfer_callback for all directories the 
uneffected files should be left untouched. This is not the case though 
since returning 'skip' for a directory automaticly skips all files in 
that directory too. So basicly nothing happens (foo1.txt is not 
updated). If I on the other hand return 'replace' in the 
async_xfer_callback foo2.txt is removed.

The problem is the same in Nautilus. If you copy one directory over 
another you get a dialog asking if you want to replace the target 
directory or not. Select replace and all files in the target directory 
dissapears. Select skip and the whole operation is skipped.

What's your comments on this, should gnome-vfs be able to handle this 
kind of 'patching' or is this something that my app has to solve by 
starting individual xfers for each file?


/Marcus