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

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On Saturday 26 May 2007, Christian Neumair wrote:
> Am Samstag, den 26.05.2007, 02:23 -0400 schrieb Liam R E Quin:
> > > 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. :-)
>
> We shouldn't write specs for everybody but for the vast majority, if it

and for things like trash that deal with user's data, i'm sure that's a good 
way to disenfranchise large numbers of people.

let's say this affects only 5% of people. that's 50000 per million. let's say 
that we have 10million users, that's half a million people. it's one thing to 
look at %s for things like "do we really need to offer option X"? but when it 
comes to user data, forget the %s and look at the human numbers.

until we can count on EAs being ubuiquitous trying to rely on them is a bad 
idea when it comes to things like user file deletion systems.

our job isn't to write code that is easy, but to write code that works. 
hopefully those two things line up often, but i guarantee it won't always. =)

as you say yourself, INI parsing isn't that big of a deal. and of course 
there's the possibility of storing more than just the basics in those INI 
files, e.g. what application the file was deleted from; digiKam, to name one 
trivial example, (optionally) uses the trash to "delete" pictures so they are 
recoverable.

i'd love to see something more efficient than tons of files, though. perhaps 
we could look at well known binary formats that are easy to support and think 
about moving to them. e.g. an ldb store might work just wonderfully for this 
and would almost certainly be more efficient.

-- 
Aaron J. Seigo
humru othro a kohnu se
GPG Fingerprint: 8B8B 2209 0C6F 7C47 B1EA  EE75 D6B7 2EB1 A7F1 DB43

Full time KDE developer sponsored by Trolltech (http://www.trolltech.com)
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