Trash Spec Idea

[Andrea Francia]

2008/8/14 João Valverde <backup95 at netcabo.pt>

> Andrea Francia wrote:
>
>> I created a similar program. A command line interface written in python
>> for the trash can.
>> The website is http://code.google.com/p/trash-cli/
>>
>> May be we can collaborate.
>>
>
> Interesting, thanks. I'll be sure to take a look and contact you if I
> can be of use. Unfortunately my knowledge of Python is limited to
> skimming some books and code but I've been meaning to dive in sometime.

If you want, you can contribute knowing little of python. You can learn
python working on  trash-cli.

   Is this feasible? Better than going through mtab right? How else
>>    could I
>>    find mount points for trash folders? How much can be done
>>    automatically
>>    when mounting or unmounting volumes? Are there any plans to
>>    involve HAL
>>    on this? My ignorance starts to show here...
>>
>>
>> The component that knows the informations about the mount points is the
>> kernel.
>> There's no need to duplicate these informations in $XDG_DATA_HOME with the
>> risk that those are inaccurate or non synchronized.
>>
>> The kernel communicates the status of the current mount points with
>> /etc/mtab and (in some systems) with /proc/mounts.
>>
>> To parse the /etc/mtab (or the /proc/mounts) file you should use getmnt(2)
>> system function that recognizes all the special cases  (like spaces in mount
>> points) that and a reinvented parser may not consider.
>>
>>
>
> Your points are all valid. The problem with mtab is that there is a lot
> of cruft in there. It's not straightforward to interpret its contents.
> Anyway doing this from the shell would require writing a parser using
> getmntent(2) as you mentioned. How do we distinguish which filesystems
> are "interesting" from the mntent structure without reading every single
> one and checking whether a .Trash* folder exists? Do we go by filesystem
> type?

You can create a blacklist of fake file system. I a fake filesystem is not
in the list just check it the .Trash folders exists.

There are a lot of filesystems out there and it seems futile to
> keep track of every single one. One possibility is writing a parser in C
> that compares the filesystems in /proc/filesystems (I assume "nodev"
> means it's a virtual filesystem?) against /etc/mtab and returns the
> mount points that have the correct type.


Are you sure that all filesystems with nodev are fake filesystems?
If you rely on /proc/filesystems your program will work only on those system
that have the /proc filesystem available.

I think that the blacklist alternative is better.

At the present trash-cli doesn't have yet a black-list, simply checks if the
.Trash directory exists. This works for me.
If you don't have a /net fileststem the blacklist will only speed up the
list-trash operation of few milliseconds, I'll implement that only after
other things.

-- 
Andrea Francia
http://andreafrancia.blogspot.com/
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