Trash mechanism

Mike Hearn m.hearn at signal.QinetiQ.com
Wed Aug 25 16:00:43 EEST 2004


> this seems to be NOT possible in the near future if
> ever. Linux supports many different filesystems and we
> need a higher level api for use in the desktop
> environment anyway. You can try pushing this idea
> possibly in reiserfs with a plugin mechanism.
> convincing multiple distros and filesystem writers
> across operating systems to implement this is not
> likely to work in a uniform manner

There's nothing wrong with desktops having enhanced functionality on 
systems that support that. It's trivial to probe for these kind of APIs 
and use them if they exist, and fall back if not. I don't think that's a 
big problem.

And on reiserfs: well, I haven't looked at the plugin API in depth, but 
from my understanding of the material on the website it would not be 
easy to write a trashcan plugin. The plugins are geared towards creating 
new kinds of files (I think) rather than modifying core FS operations 
like that.

Having said that ....

Modifying the FS to do it is probably a dumb idea and I withdraw it :)

In particular you could delete a file, compile some software, try and 
undelete the file and find it was garbage collected to make room for the 
compile even though none of those files are data you care about.

thanks -mike



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