Re: [Nautilus-list] Directory Descriptions (Was: I am going toimplement cut, copy,paste forfiles)

[Ross Burton <r burton 180sw com>]

On 22 Mar 2001 15:49:37 +0000, Matthew Walton wrote:

I think I'll throw some comments into this incremental proposal.

> I'm throwing stuff around randomly here because I don't know all that much about the
> performance issues related to XML parsing and so forth, but wouldn't it be better to
> have a central directoryinfo file that had entries for each directory complete with
> their paths? Thus:
> 
> <?xml version="1.0"?>
> <DirectoryInfoList>
>         <DirectoryInfo path="/etc">
>                 <title>Configuration files</title>
>                 <icon>/usr/share/icons/directoryicons/etc.xpm</icon>
>                 <hideinlevel>novice</hideinlevel>
>         </DirectoryInfo>
> ... (and so on)
> </DirectoryInfoList>

This looks much better to me.  It can then be called
/usr/share/nautilus/directory-info.en, or directory-info.fr etc. for
i18n.

Surely <hideinlevel> should be <showinlevel>?  Or did I mis-interpret
that node?

> However, I can see problems with this:
> 1) how do you generate the file to start with? Get the user to enter all the paths at
> first run? Don't think so somehow...

What do you mean?  The Linux Standard Base has a filesystem specificaton
which defines the standard paths for Unix systems, so we copy that and
add any common ones from distributions and programs.

> 2) you've still got the problem of reading the thing and checking every single
> directory against it to see if it should be displaying special info for it
> Although a possible solution might be to shove a tiny weeny little file with no
> useful information at all in it in each directory that has an entry in the global
> info file, so when Nautilus finds that it knows to go look in the main file for the
> info. Of course, this could still cause performance problems, not to mention
> inefficiency of storing small files on some file systems.


If the file is read once when Nautilus starts, and stored in a hash
table keyed on the path, checking it should be quite fast. Look ups only
need to be done when a directory is opened (if a distinction is made
between opening a directory and refreshing a directory) and as its a
hash table, it should be fast anyway.

Ross Burton

-- 
Ross Burton                     Software Engineer
OneEighty Software Ltd          Tel: +44 20 8263 2332
The Lansdowne Building          Fax: +44 20 8263 6314
2 Lansdowne Road                r burton 180sw com
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