Feature suggest: Copy/Move operations should be queued under some circunstances.

["Santiago Romero" <sromero gmail com>]

 Hi,

 First of all, sorry for my poor english, I'm Spanish and I don't
speak english in a regular basis.

 After having some problems when copying some files from a DVDROM
drive, I thought about reporting an idea to Nautilus and Dolphin
developers. Maybe it's already done, or was done in the past and
didn't result interesting... No idea, but here it is:

 I think that a very nice enhancement could be done to copy/move
operations when using the file explorer. When a copy/move operation is
in progress, new copy/move operations should be QUEUE instead of
executed in some circunstances, such as:

- Copy/Move source is the same as any copy/move operation currently
being executed.
- Copy/Move destination is the same as any copy/move operation
currently being executed.

 Think in those situations:

- You're copying a big file from a DVDROM (call it "copy source 1").
You continue browsing the DVD, and you want to copy more big files.
You select one and drag it to the destination. Then, as the "copy 1"
is still in progress, the CDROM starts to "spin" moving from "copy
source 1" to "copy source 2".

- You're copying big files to a local HDD drive and you plan to leave
the computer "copying" while you do some extra things away from the
computer. All files are not in the same source folder, so you can't
just "select" all simultaneously. You drag & drop the first one (which
starts copying) and you move to another folder to drag & drop another
file. Then, the disk header of the local drive you're copying the
files to starts moving between the 2 destination sectors in the drive.
If destination drive uses FAT/FAT32 fs, filesystem can get fragmented.
And the time neded to copy both files gets larger that the sum of the
times needed to copy both files separately (due to disk header
movement).

 The ideal when using the GUI of a file explorer for all those
situations should be:

- First file is copied inmediately (source1 -> dest1) .
- When you draw the second, third, ... file, if source == source1 or
dest == dest1, the copy/move operation would be queued and delayed
until the first operation ends. If source and destination are
different then the copy/move operation can be done simultaneously with
the current active operation.
- Queued operations would appear in the screen just like any active
operation, in a message box similar to current copy dialogs, but
status bar would show a test like " Queue ", and would include a
button to unqueue and execute them if the user wants to.
- All this behaviour could be configured as an option in "Preferences"
([X] Queue I/O operations using the same source or destination than
active operations).

 I do really think that the above behaviour would be very interesting
and would solve lots of slowdowns and problems when copy from/to CD,
DVD, flash drives, USB disks or even local harddrives.

 I hope the idea can be interesting.

 Thanks a lot for your time and your nice work :)

-- 
Santiago Romero (NoP/Compiler)
KUbuntu GNU/Linux
http://www.sromero.org