trash specification: Why do we keep around .desktop files for metadata?

[Christian Neumair]

Dear xdg list,

I've considered implementing the freedesktop.org trash specification [1]
for Nautilus, but I'm not willing to do this in the spec's current
shape.

I don't understand why it was decided to use .desktop files for the
trash specification, and use a pretty complex hierarchy compared with
the legacy .Trash handling.

We basically want two pieces of information per trashed file/folder:
Its deletion date, and its original storage path.

Why couldn't we just use extended attributes for storing these, and
instead require a two-directory layout, which requires extra files
for each trash entry?

A typical trash usage includes sorting of trashed entries by deletion
date, so we'd have to read this date from the corresponding info files
for each trash entry before we're able to fully display its properties:

We readdir() .Trash/files, and then for each entry .Trash/files/myfileN
open() and read() .Trash/info/myfileN, and parse its contents. It may be
quite expensive when you have many trashes for multiple volumes, and
adds implementation complexity.

If we'd stuff all the info/ contents into a cache file this would
definitly offer better performance, but we'd have to extract the info
from the info/ files. While INI file parsing isn't really a problem I
think we should still avoid it, when we have file-system facilities for
storing key/value information.

Note that FAT32 (popular USB  stick / removable storage format) does not
offer extended attributes, but it has other drawbacks anyway, and taken
its use-case we could just restore to the volume toplevel directory for
removable volumes and not save the deletion date at all. As USB stick
capacity grows, people are more likely to use more advanced file systems
like NTFS and ext*, which support extended attributes.

Using FAT32 for permanent storage is not recommended, and it's not used
on a daily basis anymore, so we shouldn't consider that an argument
against extended attributes.

[1] http://www.ramendik.ru/docs/trashspec.html

-- 
Christian Neumair <chris at gnome-de.org>