Re: [Nautilus-list] Status...

["John Sullivan" <sullivan eazel com>]

on 11/7/00 6:43 AM, Calum Benson at calum benson sun com wrote:

> Maciej Stachowiak wrote:
> 
>> That's true. I was imagining a Delete feature as just like rm,
>> i.e. not undoable. If it were undoable, it would be sort of like
>> putting the item in the trash only invisible, which seems rather
>> confusing UI-wise. In particular, there'd be no way to ensrue the item
>> is permanently gone, if you can always Undo a Delete.
> 
> Yes, come to think of it, I'd never actually tried to Undo a permanent
> delete on Windows, for example... and you can't, which sort of makes
> sense.  The trashcan *is* the Undo feature for deletes... which you
> could argue is sort of confusing in itself-- why should Undo-ing a
> delete be any different from undoing anything else?  But we can debate
> that one some other time :o)

There is a very good reason for this, actually. Undo is linear -- that is,
you can only undo actions in the reverse order that they were performed. So
if you used the undo model instead of the trash model, then you could only
retrieve a "deleted" file by undoing all other actions you've performed
since. Whereas with the trash model, you can selectively retrieve any item
in the trash at any time until the trash is emptied.

(This all assumes you have multi-level undo -- if you only have single-level
undo, the situation is obviously even worse for recovery.)

By the way, note that Nautilus will let you delete selected items from the
Trash, so you can permanently eliminate your most-secret or most-hated files
without emptying all of the Trash.

John