Re: Feature and string break request

["Rached Ben Mustapha" <benmur gmail com>]

On Mon, Mar 17, 2008 at 11:45 AM, Alexander Larsson <alexl redhat com> wrote:
>
>  On Mon, 2008-03-17 at 12:24 +0200, Lucas Rocha wrote:
>  > Hi,
>  >
>  > 2008/3/17, Vincent Untz <vuntz gnome org>:
>
> > > Le lundi 17 mars 2008, à 09:57 +0100, Alexander Larsson a écrit :
>  > >
>
> > > Looks like I didn't emphasizes enough the "in some part" part of my
>  > >  sentence :-) It doesn't completely deprecate file-roller, sure, but it
>  > >  deprecates it for quite some use cases. It could totally replace
>  > >  file-roller in my personal case, eg.
>  > >
>  > >  What do other release team members think?
>  >
>  > I'm more concerned about the usability part of this addition. I'm sure
>  > if "mounting an archive" is an intuitive metaphor for the users.
>
>  Not that Apple are gods or whatever, but this is what OSX does with e.g.
>  DMG files. It also maps to what you do with other kinds of things like
>  network mounts, so the mount concept is not entierly new to users (even
>  if the mounts are not normally loopback mounts, and loopback is a bit
>  "meta").
>
>  I don't think mounting an archive is something a user who have never
>  seen this before would think of as a possible operation, but once you've
>  used this feature one time I don't think its particularly hard to
>  understand (and if you never find this feature that is not a great
>  problem). However, I don't think there is a better alternative approach.
>  The only one I can think of is to pretend archives are directories, and
>  that is fraught with confusion about what is a directory and what is a
>  file both in the implementation and in the user interface, as well as
>  lifetime cycle problems.
>
>  I'd classify this as a very useful feature for some class of users, and
>  not very interesting for others. For the second class just make file
>  roller the default action for archives, and this will never ever show up
>  to these users unless they look for it. If they do they can then easily
>  change the default handler for the archive types if they are interested
>  in often using this feature.

Would adding an extra location widget (like for trash:, burn: etc) on
archive windows offering to open file-roller to modify the archive be
helpful ?

This would add a level of indirection for people wanting to use
file-roller, but would make it more discoverable. Maybe it is just
abusing the feature and not that useful, I'm not sure.

Rached