Re: GWorkspace 0.7.0, System, Applications and restart

[M. Uli Kusterer]

At 17:34 Uhr +0000 21.03.2005, MJ Ray wrote:
>  > [...] I support MJ Ray's proposal. Add a recycle
> >  bin for the disks you know about. [...]
>
> I've not proposed anything. I wouldn't presume to tell Enrico
> what code to write. I just don't want any coding time wasted if
> there is a critical flaw in this idea. If someone else writes
> the code before I do (very likely, as my ObjC is poor), I'll
> give at least three cheers.

 Sorry, guess that came across wrong.

 I didn't have the intention of bossing around Enrico. I guess I get 
a little too aggressive trying to fight for usability. I'll try to 
split up the reasons for my rationale, and of course it's Enrico's 
choice what he wants to do:

1) The recycle bin is there to add "forgiveness" to the UI. Like the 
"undo" command, it lets users trash their files, and then recover 
them if they realize they made a mistake. Makes the computer less 
dangerous.

2) The suggestion of adding a "Delete" command doesn't go through the 
recycle bin, and thus robs the user of forgiveness.

3) The reason for the "Delete" command was made to avoid having 
GWorkspace move files between drives when they're very likely to end 
up deleted anyway. Thus, the "Delete" command is really just a quick 
workaround.

4) It seems undesirable to me to add a "Delete" command, because most 
people would just always use "Delete" because they often won't know 
for what files dropping a file into the recycle bin will actually be 
fast, and for which ones "Delete" will be better. So we'd effectively 
end up with most users using "Delete" and thus the "forgiveness" 
provided by the recycle bin will be a benefit on paper only.

5) If we manage to have a recycler folder on each disk, or at least 
on most disks, we'll *solve* the problem for which "Delete" is the 
workaround. For those cases where this won't help, we could a) behave 
like now and just take the speed hit b) provide an interface for 
advanced users to add their own mount points to the list of disks 
that can have trashes. This would probably also benefit NSWorkspace, 
which could benefit from this as well c) Write some auto-detect code 
that builds a default list for b by scanning the disk. This could be 
done once at initial startup, and might only be supported on some 
systems, but would increase usability noticeably.
--
Cheers,
M. Uli Kusterer
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