Re: Updated undo patch

[Cosimo Cecchi <cosimoc gnome org>]

On Fri, 2012-01-27 at 17:41 +0000, Calum Benson wrote:

> I'm also a little surprised that the GNOME designers that Cosimo asked
> would have said the multi-level undo was overkill for a file manager
> -- Apple certainly thought it was important enough to add it to the
> file manager in OS X 10.7, where previous versions only had single
> level undo IIRC. (On the other hand, I suppose you could argue that if
> it took them 10 years to add it…)
> 
> I couldn't tell you how often I've ever used it in 10.7, admittedly,
> but when it comes to having the same function behave differently in
> different applications, you want to be 100% sure it's the right thing
> to do, especially when it's a function that directly manipulates
> people's files.

Hi Calum,

Admittedly, I haven't tried Finder on OS X 10.7, so I can't really tell
how they ended up implementing it; there are several reasons why I chose
a single action for Nautilus:
- you probably need a different UI than a menu. Time Machine comes as an
example, but that also requires a support from the lower layers of the
OS we don't currently have
- if you add multiple levels of undo, you would like to keep track of
the operations happening on the file system, and invalidate past actions
accordingly. This can be complex and is missing completely from the
current implementation
- I think it's always better to start small and then find solutions to
more complex use cases than doing the opposite, especially when the
feature is complex and involves user's data

That being said, nothing in software is written in stone...I am not
against the idea of being able to freely undo any past transaction
per-se, but it would require way more effort, both on a technical and
from a design point of view.

Cosimo