Trash, Delete, Shred

[David Hugh-Jones]

On Sat, 2003-06-28 at 09:28, Luis Pedro Coelho wrote:
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> Please, don't do this. Sometimes I want to delete, sometimes I want to move to 
> trash.s

Can I ask what the underlying need is?

For remote files, you don't always want to move them into your trash -
e.g. a 1G file over a slow connection. _Mostly_ I would think people
want to delete remote files. Partly for connection reasons, partly
because a file in your trash that was once "on some host somewhere" has
probably lost all context that would explain where to put it back.

What about "delete" vs "move to trash" on local filesystems? What makes
you sometimes want to delete something rather than move it to the trash
for deletion later? I'm not being rhetorical.


> 
> > Remote files will be deleted without moving to the trash, even if move
> > to trash is selected.
> 
> Don't do this either. IIRC, MS-Windows does the same and I found it a horrible 
> thing (I haven't used it in years, so I can't be sure it still does so).
> 
> Remote file handling is a problem, yes, but just making automatic deletes when 
> I want to move to trash is not the solution. "Do what I want not what you 
> think I mean".
> Already fish seems to disallow a move-to-trash, which gets on my nerves 
> already: especially if I am fishing to a server across the same building 
> where the bandwidth is actually limited by the speed of my disk drive.
> 

Hmm.

I hate adding configuration options, but:

(o) Move all files to trash
( ) Move local files to trash, delete remote files
( ) Delete all files 

[x] Ask for confirmation

 
> I think you mean your patch. Right now, I just enabled confirmations for 
> Delete (while keeping Trash unconfirmed) and I do get a confirmation-box with 
> Shift+DEL and none with DEL. If you change this behaviour it could be 
> considered a regression.

I agree. Essentially: DEL does the default action, and has the default
confirmation. Shift+DEL will "always delete", and will force
confirmation unless the default action is delete anyway.

> 
> Overall, I must say I am against it. My suggestion: get rid of "Shred." It's a 
> broken concept and very few people understand what it means. And those will 
> probably understand it doesn't give you any reassurances.
> It's a bad idea.

If shred doesn't actually guarantee that your files are killed, then we
should ditch it - but I didn't know that. I would be fairly keen to get
rid of shred, I think it is more a job for a specialized app than a
general file manager.

Now if we did get rid of shred then Ctrl+DEL would be available for
"force move to trash" :-) Again, this would usually force confirmation
(in case you're doing it for a huge remote file).

One issue: do we have a valid way of distinguishing "local files" from
remote files (that doesn't break on strange ioslaves)?

Dave