Re: Proposal for bug 73937 / symlinks in nautilus



On Tue, 2003-01-07 at 10:30, Alexander Larsson wrote:
> > http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=73937
> > 
> > It fixes the problem of resolving the real path of symlinks in nautilus.
> > The bug is, if you change to a dir which is a symlink i.e.
> > /pub->/misc/pub and click the dir up button you end up in /misc and not
> > /.
> > 
> > I think.....see the bug report what other people think about that.
> > 
> > The patch contains no change log entry.....be patient with me I'm a
> > newbie volunteer, who need to be educated by you.
> > 
> > Would be nice if I could get some feedback.
> > (I know you all are busy hunting "the big bugs")
> 
> I agree with the reasoning that we should do it the unix-way, so I'm 
> changing this.

I would hesitate to change the behavior of the application like this
when there is no strong evidence that the new way would actually be any
better for the majority of the users; especially when a bug doesn't have
any duplicates like this one.  Maybe some user testing would be in
order?..  (And shouldn't this change be discussed with the usability
team at least?)

And in fact, I don't agree with this change.  The only reason that is
given on Bugzilla is that the old behavior is different from that of a
command-line shell, but if Nautilus is really supposed to imitate the
usability of a command-line shell, then we are all doomed.  :-)

First of all, this makes the notion of a location in Nautilus much more
complicated to understand.  Before, "/folder1/folder2/folder3" meant
that you were in folder3 which is contained in folder2 which is
contained in folder1.  folder2 was never a link; so it was obvious what
the physical hierarchy of the directory structure on the disk was.  Now
instead, "/folder1/folder2/folder3" could mean any sort of things
depending on which of these folders are actually links.  IMHO while
links are difficult to understand already, this makes them even more
difficult to grok.  (Besides, this is not how the other systems (MacOS
and Windows) work.)

Also, in the old way the meaning of the up arrow button was very clear:
"bring me to the folder that contains this folder".  And it was
consistent too: once you had a certain folder displayed, no matter how
you got there, hitting the up arrow you would always give you the same
result.  Now, it becomes all complicated because the expected result of
clicking the up arrow button depends on the history of how you got
there-- which it didn't before.

So the sum is, changing the behavior in the proposed way would make both
the location bar and the "up arrow" button harder to understand without
adding any usability benefit.  

(BTW, if you want to go to the folder from which you came, you already
have a button for it: the left arrow button.  Why blur the behavior of
the already confusing "Up Arrow" button even more?)

-- 
Ettore Perazzoli <ettore ximian com>

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