File drop popup menu removal

[David Faure]

On Monday 06 September 2004 12:06, Guillaume Laurent wrote:
> David Faure wrote:
> 
> >I don't see why we would want that.
> >Everyone copying a file onto a floppy disk is going to shout very loudly at us
> >for losing his original file. And no, not everyone knows about Ctrl.
> >  
> >
> That popup could still be a bit more clever, for instance when dragging 
> from an ftp dir where you don't have write permissions, it's pretty 
> obvious that the only choice is "copy". Presenting the user with two 
> other options that he can't use is confusing, the popup has no reason to 
> appear.

This is true. We don't show Move when the initial protocol has no support for
deleting (e.g. HTTP), but not when this particular directory is readonly.
However that's a bit difficult to find out, given that the drop contains only
the source URL... Ah maybe the dnd actions could be used so that the source
only offers Copy / Link actions when it doesn't support deleting. But I don't
think this is supposed by Qt/XDND (it's either "all actions" or "one" AFAICS)
The other option is to stat the source directory before showing the popup,
but that's too slow. And the last option I can think of, is a kde-specific data
shipped in the drag-object like we do with x-kde-cutselection (libkonq/konq_drag.cc)
This kind of hack is frowned upon by people who try to implement compatible
DnD with kde/konqueror though.

> A simple rule could be to copy when dropping to a different  
> filesystem, move otherwise.

You mean not showing the popup, too, then?
I hate this semi-clever behavior in Windows.
Any program which tries to guess what the user wants is bound to fail.
And any program which modifies its behavior based on something that
is more or less hidden to the user (isn't the whole idea of mountpoints
to *hide* the filesystem separations?) is bad behavior.

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