Re: [patch] Bug 88585, Sorting of size column is messed up

[Tomas Junnonen <tjunnone abo fi>]

David Emory Watson wrote:

> This isn't a bug in Nautilus.  It's a problem with using the words
> "ascending" and "descending" to describe data which may not have a
> well defined order (better words would have been "normal" and
> "reversed").

I would say all the columns currently implemented in the Nautilus view
can be arranged into an sensible order, defining what is "normal"
sounds a lot harder on the other hand.

> Actually its still not consistent.  For example the date column sorts
> from most recent to least recent when the arrow points down.  This is
> what gtk+ calls ascending order, but numerically more recent dates
> are larger then less recent dates, so the dates are really
> descending...

> So why don't we fix the date column too?

The date column should probably be fixed too, and I can create a patch
for that.

> Here's my rhyme behind the reason: "When the arrow points down, the
> user does not frown, but instead they get what they want."  So
> basically, the down arrow is used for the default (and hopefully most
> useful) sort order.  The up arrow is the reverse of whatever the down
> arrow is.  When I originally ran into this I decided that biggest
> file to smallest file was more useful.  Go figure...

I think consistency is a lot more important than some arbitrary chosen
"better" order. How exactly is larger file size more useful than
smaller? It's clearly not. Windows Explorer and Macs both do this
consistently, while that doesn't mean we must too, it certainly should
be considered.

Take a look at the GNOME Search Tool (Actions->Search for File). The
column sorting seems perfectly logical and I think we should adopt the
same behavior in Nautilus. So not only is Nautilus not consistent with
itself, it's also not consistent with the rest of GNOME. The search
tool BTW has exactly the same columns as Nautilus. So while the
ordering might have been a conscious design decision at the time I
think it has now clearly turned into an bug.

Tomas