Re: Deactivating the Trash

[Matthew Thomas <mpt myrealbox com>]

On 5 Sep, 2005, at 4:42 AM, Alexander Larsson wrote:
> On Sat, 2005-09-03 at 21:46 -0300, Matthew Paul Thomas wrote:
> ...
> >         Automatically delete items from the Trash:
> >         [ Never            :^]
> ...
> Yeah. This seems like a good idea.

Now in Bugzilla <http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=315022>.

> Perhaps we should also somehow notice when disks are near full and the  
> trash is large and auto-clean it?
> ...

That would be a separate feature, though it would alter the interface  
for deleting old items a bit: the "Never" option above would be  
replaced by a checkbox, to be parallel with the option for deleting  
when nearly full.

    Automatically delete old items from the Trash:
    [/] [after 1 month   :^]
    [/] when a disk has less than [  100 MB]H free

However, there would be a few problems with doing this. First, it would  
be hard to come up with a meaningful way of specifying a threshold that  
worked for volumes of wildly varying sizes (hard disks, USB keys,  
floppy disks, etc). Such an option could be made volume-specific and  
presented in the volume's Properties window, but that would be an  
unfortunate separation from the rest of the Trash options. (Windows  
puts each device in its own tab in the Recycle Bin Properties, but the  
interface is very awkward.  
<http://www.certiguide.com/apfr/cg_apfr_TheRecycleBin.htm>)

Second, when you're running out of disk space, emptying the Trash isn't  
the only -- or even necessarily the best -- potential source of free  
space. To compare with Windows again, since Windows 98 it has had a  
Disk Cleanup Wizard letting you choose from a variety of things you  
might want to delete.  
<http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/windows2000pro/evaluate/ 
featfunc/bestperf.mspx#EDAA>

And third, if even emptying the Trash doesn't make enough room on the  
disk to get beyond the threshold, the Trash will unexpectedly turn into  
a black hole. Anything you put in it will be deleted immediately.

--
Matthew Paul Thomas
http://mpt.net.nz/