[Patch] #29984 Change file permission using octal numbers

[David Faure]

On Friday 16 May 2003 12:19, Scott Wheeler wrote:
> On Friday 16 May 2003 10:10, Dominik Seichter wrote:
> > No, I think it is really obvious, because the number changes as you click
> > on the checkboxes and the check boxes change as you type a number.
> > At the beginning most users won't care, but after sometime they will
> > probably see that changing the permission is faster if they just have to
> > type the number in the line edit.
> 
> I think this is a fundamental misunderstanding of the user base.
> 
> *) Most users will never change the permissions on a file using KDE -- ever

Yes. But for those it doesn't matter at all how that dialog looks like :)

> *) Most of those that do don't know octal permission notation
> *) Most of them don't care to learn octal notation

But you don't necessarily need to, to benefit from this additional lineedit.
If you want to set the same permissions on many files, but from different
directories, or at different moments in time, you can just do it with the mouse
the first time, note down the number it generated, and reuse that number later
on to change other files similarly. No need to actually understand octal
notation to do that, it's only a matter of copy and paste.

> *) The current dialog is already confusing

Possibly, but it's also quite inconvenient when it has to be used in a repetitive
way (as with all GUI things), so every little bit helps.

I still have to try out the patch or see a screenshot to see how it looks like though.

-- 
David Faure -- faure at kde.org, dfaure at klaralvdalens-datakonsult.se
Qt/KDE/KOffice developer
Klarälvdalens Datakonsult AB, Platform-independent software solutions