<div class="gmail_quote"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"><div class="gmail_quote"><div>What about giving the user a choice when a duplicate is found? As a user, I wouldn't like the software to create two copies of the same project (maybe different versions of it) and then me having to delete one of them. Lets just give a "Overwrite, Rename, Skip" option.<br>
What do you guys think ?<br></div></div></blockquote><div> <br>My vote is against, for the following reasons:<br><ul><li>True duplicates (the kind we don't want to have) will only occur in one of two scenarios.<br>a) I export all projects, then import all projects on the same PlasMate instance, which is a senseless thing to do. Or I import twice onto the same instance, again senseless.<br>
b) I export my projects and then go to another computer where someone else has imported one of my projects (from online, say). This is gonna be rare, and isn't really a true duplicate. You may actually want to keep both.<br>
The vast majority of conflicts are likely going to be the kind where you unintentionally name two different things with the same name.<br><br></li><li>Even in the rare case that true duplicates occur, the remedy is trivial. One button-click away.<br>
<br></li><li>Prompting with "Overwrite, Rename, Skip" is bad because, as I have repeatedly reiterated, folder names are invisible to the user. ie, when there is a folder name conflict - <b>*the user cannot see it*</b>! If the user doesn't see a conflict but PlasMate prompts and insists that there is a conflict, we are definitely going to confuse the user. Furthermore if he decides to rename but doesn't see any visible effect from the renaming (because folder names are not visible!), he is going to become even more confused. And worse - he will probably report it as a bug.</li>
</ul><br>If you guys insist I guess we could use a hash check to ignore "pure" true duplicates, so the algorithm reads something like this:<br><br>for each folder f in import archive {<br> for each folder g in the target location {<br>
if hash(f) == hash(g) { // a "pure" duplicate<br> delete f from archive;<br> goto end;<br> }<br> }<br> while f also exists in the target location {<br> generate a new name for f and rename f in the archive;<br>
}<br> end:<br>}<br>extract archive to target location;<br><br>But particularly for the third reason above, I really don't like the idea of prompting.<br><br clear="all">----<br>Jason "moofang" Lim Yuen Hoe<br>
<a href="http://yuenhoe.co.cc/">http://yuenhoe.co.cc/</a><br><br>
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