Re: Copying behavior

[Alexander Larsson <alexl redhat com>]

On Tue, 4 Feb 2003, Marcus Bjurman wrote:

> 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?

This is typical posix semantics that unix has used since it was created. 
gnome-vfs is largely an extension of the unix filesystem and tries to 
keep posix semantics as much as possible. Changing this would be a bad 
thing, as it currently behaves the way programmers expect it to and 
changing it would be a huge ABI change.

It might however be possible to add a new GnomeVFSXferOptions so that you 
can get the behaviour you want from gnome_vfs_xfer.

-- 
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
 Alexander Larsson                                            Red Hat, Inc 
                   alexl redhat com    alla lysator liu se 
He's a globe-trotting Jewish barbarian gone bad. She's a wealthy mutant 
detective prone to fits of savage, blood-crazed rage. They fight crime!