NetAccess::statInternal and showing job progress

[Alex Merry]

  On 22/07/10 19:04, Sebastian Kügler wrote:
> On Thu July 22 2010 10:17:41 David Faure wrote:
>> On Tuesday 20 July 2010, Chani wrote:
>>> 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.
Perhaps we need some distinction (possibly made at the application 
level) about whether a job is ephemeral or not.  Things like opening and 
saving files across the network are ephemeral - we don't want 
notifications if they're quick and successful, and we don't want records 
of them in the notification list if they're successful.  Notifications 
should appear when a job is taking a long time or has failed (possibly 
even not when they've failed, in the case of a stat, say - it's the 
application's job to determine whether a failed stat is a problem).

Non-ephemeral jobs are things like file transfers - the user probably 
wants a record of completed file transfers.  Although we may want this 
to be configurable.

Alex