Trash mechanism (tech wrting proposal)

[David Faure]

On Thursday 26 August 2004 14:45, mr at ramendik.ru wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> Alexander Larsson wrote:
> 
> > Yeah. We should probably also make it world unreadable and with sticky
> > bit (like /tmp) so that you can't look at it, and rename or remove other
> > peoples trash dirs. Of course, even with the sticky bit set the person
> > who creates the .Trash dir can still rename/remove other users trash
> > dirs. I dunno what to do about that.
> 
> Why not automatically chown it to a "trash" user immediately after creation?
The existence of a given user depends on the system setup, which we can't rely on.
In addition, only root can chown files anyway.

> In this way, even those who prefer not to use Gnome or KDE for File
> Management (I'm a Midnight Commander guy, and there are other FMs too)
> will be able to use this. Even the (admittedly problematic) libtrash could
> be updated to use the same trash mechanism. And, things like automatic
> background purges (non-dependent on DEs and even on X) could be created;
> and Samba could get to use this trash mechanism and perhaps even make it
> available to Windows clients...
Yes.

> The opportunity is tremendous and exceeds just a Gnome+KDE sphere. So I'm
> very interested in how this thread works out. And I'm a professional tech
> writer.
> 
> So, perhaps anyone would want my services in writing/editing/finalising
> this spec? I'm available as a volunteer here.
Sounds great! Once we hash out the final $topdir/.Trash creation issue,
would you mind summarizing the chosen solution in a formal standard
document?
The basic structure of the document would probably be like
- Location of trash directories
- Structure of the trash directories (info/ and files/ subdirs)
- File ids (unique identifier used for the files in info/ and files/)
- Contents of info files (original location \n date of deletion in ISO 8601 format)
- Handling of deleted directories (nothing special :), but mention single info file)

Thanks!

-- 
David Faure, faure at kde.org, sponsored by Trolltech to work on KDE,
Konqueror (http://www.konqueror.org), and KOffice (http://www.koffice.org).