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

[Liam R E Quin]

On Thu, 2007-05-24 at 22:58 +0200, Christian Neumair wrote:
[...]
> We basically want two pieces of information per trashes 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 hierarchy, which requires extra files
> for each trash entry?

How well would that work in, say, a corporate or university environment,
if user directories are NFS-mounted, or are on NTFS shared volumes?
How widely supported are such attributes on, say, network accessed
storage units (usually these use FAT32 in my experience, or sometimes
NTFS)

Possibly there should be fall-back to the existing mechanism?

>  As USB stick
> storage grows, people are more likely to use more advanced file systems
> like NTFS and ext*, which support extended attributes.
I'm not sure it's very productive to abandon hardware that's in
extremely widespread use today.  For what it's worth, not all
Linux distributions include support for writing to NTFS file systems
"out of the box" today either.

> 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.
"not used on a daily basis"? by anyone on the planet? I don't believe
you. :-)

It might be worth experimenting, but I'd hope that if I take a USB stick
that has a Trash folder on it, that I used a year ago, that the undelete
function would still work.  So you have to keep backward compatibility,
which means you can only make the spec (and the code) more complex, not
simpler.  You can make it faster maybe in the default case.  But is it
worth it?

Liam

-- 
Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/
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