Re: Deactivating the Trash

[Luca Ferretti <elle uca libero it>]

Il giorno sab, 03/09/2005 alle 21.46 -0300, Matthew Paul Thomas ha
scritto: 
> On Thu, 2005-09-01 at 11:46 +0200, Christian Neumair wrote:
> > ...
> > We should really have 4 deletion/trash operation modes:
> > 
> The idea behind the Trash is that every so often you'll throw out
> something by mistake and want to get it back. So the Trash is a
> container for things that you *probably* don't want any more.
> 
> As a general rule, the longer something has been in the Trash, the
> greater the probability that you don't want it any more. The Trash in
> Mac OS, and the Recycle Bin in Windows, have never understood this: when
> you empty either of them, stuff you threw out 30 seconds ago (maybe
> accidentally) gets deleted along with stuff you threw out two months
> ago. To make matters worse, you have to empty the Trash manually! We're
> supposed to have computers to do menial jobs like that.

Note that deletion_time is not the only "metadata" to monitor. A smart
trash algorithm should be able to figure that a 3M MPEG movie is less
important than a 3M Gnumeric spreasheet, 'couse MBs are typical size of
videos, while only a spreadsheed with a lot (and maybe important) data
can reach MBs. 

As well as if you are removing from trash a file previously signed with
"important" emblem :-)

Unfortunately i suppose this is hard to implement (a table with median
and variance of file type sizes?) and to prompt to user as warning..


        <b><big>Confirm deletion of maybe important items?</b><big>
        
        You are going to delete some items that could be important for
        you. This message appears when the items were previously marked
        with the "Important" emblem or are bigger then the typical sizes
        of their file types (you made a big effort to produce them).
        Please confirm their deletion, activating the checkbox.
        
        -------------------------------------------------------------------
        [*] file1.doc (1,5 MB)
        [*] team.sxi  (8,1 MB)
        -------------------------------------------------------------------
        
        
                         [ Delete All ]  [ Cancel ]  [ Delete Selected ]