Trash mechanism
Mike Hearn
m.hearn at signal.QinetiQ.com
Wed Aug 25 14:05:59 EEST 2004
> Wouldn't the GPL licensing cause problems preloading it for non-GPL
> compatible progams, though?
It's not the licensing that is problematic about libtrash: if people
decided to go for it we could quickly and easily rewrite it under a
looser license. The main problem is that it works by modifying the
semantics of very low level functions. This is just asking to break
backwards compatibility and have bizarre unexpected side effects.
In the past I've encountered some apps (sorry, not naming names) which
create and delete files at a truly prolific speed. If every file that
was deleted was stored in a trash can, you'd rapidly run out of disk space.
LD_PRELOADed libraries can be useful but we need better infrastructure
in order to deploy them as part of a desktop system (in particular, some
way to mark binaries as having particular libraries preloaded).
A better solution is either:
- to implement this at the FS level, so there is a userspace API to
locate deleted files and undelete them, with space being selected for
reuse based on the age of the deleted files and then actually deleted
atomically
OR
- to have a freedesktop API specifically for trashing files, whereby
trashing is something you only do for user documents and not for system
level files.
thanks -mike
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