NetAccess::statInternal and showing job progress

[Sebastian Kügler]

On Thu July 22 2010 10:17:41 David Faure wrote:
> On Tuesday 20 July 2010, Chani wrote:
> > On July 20, 2010 11:32:35 David Faure wrote:
> > > On Tuesday 20 July 2010, Aaron J. Seigo wrote:
> > > > On July 20, 2010, you wrote:
> > > > > On Friday 16 July 2010, Aaron J. Seigo wrote:
> > > > > > is there any pressing reason to show the progress info for
> > > > > > stat/exist checks on remote files? i'd like to commit this and
> > > > > > backport if there is consensus.
> > > > > 
> > > > > I object. This is very useful for slow (or even hanging)
> > > > > connections.
> > > > 
> > > > for file transfers, i agree. but for stats and existence checking,
> > > > what's the use there? other than for debugging, which i really don't
> > > > think is a good excuse for showing such things to the user every
> > > > single time, i can't see the benefit to sending job notifications
> > > > about checking for file details.
> > > > 
> > > > stats and existence checking are almost never something the user is
> > > > actively triggering (from their POV), and so the desktop starts
> > > > sounding very "chatty" telling them about all kinds of internal
> > > > details of things they haven't triggered (again, from their POV) and
> > > > which they really don't care about.
> > > 
> > > Again, if it takes <1s, then yes, I agree that they don't need to care.
> > > But if it takes 10 minutes because the server isn't responding, and
> > > meanwhile (without any kind of progress info) they don't know if the
> > > image got saved or not, then this would be a very severe bug, leading
> > > to data loss, potentially (you think a file exists, and it does not).
> > 
> > erm, but this wasn't about save, it was about stat :)
> 
> ... which is usually done just before saving, to warn in case you're about
> to overwrite an existing file.

Still, "I'm checking if there's a file I'd be overwriting" is not something 
that the user needs to know. We might need feedback somewhere, but that should 
be "saving your file now" (and covering the complete process: stat'ing, 
transferring and saving), anything with finer granularity is not useful IMO. 
Likely, as Save is often fire and forget, we'd only need a warning if the file 
wasn't saved in the end, maybe a confirmation that the file is now on disk and 
you can happily pull the cable, or whatever.
-- 
sebas

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