Re: Nautilus user feedback

[Michael Meeks <michael ximian com>]

Hi Calum,

	Where do you find these remarkably positive and realistic people ? :-)

On Thu, 2002-11-21 at 11:51, Calum Benson wrote:
> Nautilus comes up with an error on my home directory 'Sorry, couldn't
> display all the contents of "<username>"' - why not, earlier versions
> didn't complain.
>
> ** (nautilus:12916): WARNING **: Hit unhandled case 9 (Bad file handle)
> in fm_report_error_loading_directory

	I've just read the gnome-vfs codepaths; and it's relatively hard to see
where this is coming from; we'd need to run a debugging build on his
machine. I thought this might be a race between readdir_r and statting
the file, causing an open to fail or somesuch; but no - file-method.c
(do_read_directory) ignores the return value from the subsequent stat -
leaving me confused. Is it possible that something is leaking file
descriptors and he's run out ? I'd be interested in an lsof of the
process.

> nautilus (still) thinks Adobe Fontlist files are postscript documents,
> so mistakenly tries to throw them at gv which fails.

	Ok; so - we need an Adobe Fontlist file; and we need to work out why it
has the same magic number as a postscript document, and then fix
gnome-mime-data - pretty trivial, if we have a few Fontlist files that
is.

> nautilus can't handle jar or tar.gz files.

	Can CDE-explorer-whatever-its-called ? or is this just a feature wish
list ?

> I looked at a simple text file with nautilus and it failed to handle
> it. It generates an error 'The Text view encountered an error and can't
> continue. You can choose another view or go to a different location.'
> It started to display it, and then went blank. I get an error:
> 
> DKIOCINFO failed : Invalid argument

	Looks extremely, strange to me; never seen anything like that; a
Solaris warning or some sort ?

> ** (nautilus:12916): WARNING **: A view failed. The UI will handle this
> with a dialog but this should be debugged.

	The thing just crashed for some reason; chasing DKIOCINFO, just did a
strings on all my system libraries and can't find this - Solaris
specific brokenness I guess, which makes it a little hard for us to fix
locally.

> Nautilus shows a double dash ("--") underneath a directory. It should
> display nothing or something useful.

	It is something useful; it's telling you that it's not traversing the
directory hierarchy to count the items ( possibly because it's on an NFS
mount ).

> Nautilus (and eye of gnome) still give me a pink checkerboard when
> displaying tiff files.

	EOG & Nautilus share that code; why it's pink I've no idea - possibly a
gdk-pixbuf bug - an example tiff file attached to an eog bug report
would help - particularly since locate says I have only 1 tiff on my
system and it's not transparent.

> After a little while, nautilus stopped responding to mouse clicks at
> all. Completely. I can't even close it. (It looks as though this is a
> stupid UI problem - there were hidden popup windows.

	That sounds pretty ghastly indeed; we should make those popups
transient for the toplevel. I imagine this is really a performance issue
though, since I always see those windows.

> Nautilus has a pretty stupid idea about file typing. For example, it
> thinks README.it (the Italian readme) on the redhat CD is a music
> file.

	Perhaps the broken mp3 sniffer - if mp3 files had a magic type it'd
significantly help people I guess.

>  At least, that's what the icon looks like. There are two
> problems, really (1) it's getting the type wrong, and (2) the typing
> isn't tied in to the available applications. CDE is WAY BETTER than
> gnome here.

	It's WAY BETTER to be able to detect a type and not do so, simply
because you don't have a handler installed ? that's crack smoking
indeed. It's worth being able to organise / sort your files by type
without having "Mentor graphics Schematic capture" software loaded,
indeed I'd want to expand the mime sniffing D/B as far as we can
regardless of handler availability.

> Essentially, nautilus seems thoroughly broken and is pretty well
> unuseable.

	I hope someone helpful at Sun is filing these as bugzilla bugs so they
can be handled in the normal way.

	Regards,

		Michael.

-- 
 mmeeks gnu org  <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot