Trash spec 0.2, technical questions

Jerry Haltom wasabi at larvalstage.net
Tue Aug 31 07:50:03 EEST 2004


I have seen another potential problem.

There are a lot of situations where sites have user name policies which
are representative of the user's actual name, or OTHER CHANGABLE VALUE.

In these cases, the user's name may change. If the user agent is looking
for .Trash-$user, it will can possibly fail, and create another directory.
In this case, the user will "lose" his files and require administrator
interaction (a help desk call, we want to minimize these).

I don't have a particularly good solution for this... but I can point out
is that a user name change doesn't make user's files disappear on Windows.
;) We need to handle it.

I would then propose a secondary check for a .Trash/$user directory OWNED
by the user (ownership is by uid... these do not change, and if they do,
it's the admin's fault). I realize this will require a list of the
directory, and a stat on each subdirectory, and this might be bad. It also
might not. I don't know.

Additionally, if the secondary check succeeds, the found directory should
be renamed. All of this needs to be done safely in the case of two
user agents on different systems doing the process at the same time or
similar. ;)

This sounds like a lot of work... I don't know what to say about that...
but I believe we MUST handle his.




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