Unifying ~/Desktop

[Havoc Pennington]

Martin Konold <martin.konold at erfrakon.de> writes:
> On Tuesday 11 June 2002 04:07 am, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> 
> > operation (and faster). Also, it means that the trash on a shared
> > filesystem is shared. So if I throw something away on a workgroup
> > server anyone in the workgroup can remove it from the trash. Hmm, also
> 
> I am afraid that this cause privacy issues.
> 
> > it means that for removable media the trash travels with the media, so
> > if I throw something away on a floppy it stays on the floppy instead
> > of copying to/from the hard drive. There may be other reasons.
> 
> This can be a severe privacy/security issue when giving away the floppy.
> 

I don't see the argument there, but the trash format isn't something
we necessarily have to sort out for now, as long as we can both use
the same ~/Desktop/Trash.desktop file.

(If throw away a file, and it ends up in ~/Trash, then it's quite
possible that moving it from its original location to ~/Trash changes
the set of people that are able to or likely to see it, or changes
whether the file is on a crypted filesystem, or perhaps moves the file
from local storage onto my NFS-mounted home dir; all those are
possible - though in my mind not very important - security issues.
Note that they apply to Nautilus as well since Nautilus will fall back
to ~/.Trash on nonwritable volumes.

On the other hand if you move /mnt/floppy/foo to /mnt/floppy/Trash,
you are much less likely to have changed who is able to see "foo" in
any fundamental way. There's possibly a concern that users think "foo"
is irrevocably gone, when in fact it's just in the trash, but here you
just have to rely on users understanding what trash means. After all,
if they are confused about this, it could easily bite them in the
~/Trash case as well - they could throw their secret love letters in
~/Trash too, and think they were gone, and have someone find it.  I
know I share my user account with other people in the same house.

I believe the Nautilus way was copied from how the Mac works, so
there's some history behind it. I could be wrong.)

In any case, not something we have to resolve right away, though it'd
be kind of nice to think about.

Havoc