Re: File manager tree.

[Brady Hegberg <bradyh bitstream net>]

I haven't done a lot of Unix filesystem programming but:

A.  (Mr Fox already suggested)  What if you had a setting to turn off or on 
the plus?  It doesn't seem like this would be much harder than removing the 
code altogether.

B.  What if you measured the amount of time it took to make the first 
pass?  If the first pass took longer per name or longer in total than a set 
amount then you could put a question mark icon up (or something) and the 
user would have to doubleclick or right click on the icon and select 
"properties" to find out what it is.  A nice feature would be to scan the 
file if the user let the mouse sit over it for more than a certain amount 
of time.  I'm not sure if this makes sense from the standpoint of the 
actual code but it seems like a solution that Alan Cooper would like.

C.  A combination of these could offer to turn off the plus feature if it 
ever detected a slow filesystem.  Or is this overly intrusive in a talking 
paper-clip sort of way?


>Hello guys,
>
>    So I fixed the bug people were reporting with the file manager tree
>for displaying incorrect data.  But this is not an optimal solution.
>
>    The problem is as follows:
>
>        1. The Windows-like feature of the tree in the file manager is
>           that you get a little square next to each directory which
>           can be empty for directories that do not contain any
>           subdirectories or a box with a plus sign, if the directory
>           contains subdirectories.
>
>           If you have a plus sign ([+]) and click on it, it converts
>           to a [-] icon and opens the tree.
>
>           This is a nice feature.
>
>        2. Slow file systems are all over the place in Unix.  They
>           appear on the most unusual places: special directories might
>           refer to remote servers (afs, dfs), arbitrary locations can
>           be slow (NFS /users), or special vfs places (/#smb/ for
>           server listings).
>
>     The big problem here is that in order to achieve (1) you need to
>do a 2-level scan of the directories: one pass to scan all the names
>returned and stat the thing to figure out if the name is a directory,
>or if it is a file (ie, if it is a subdirectory, we need to scan the
>child to see if it has directories, in that case, we need to stick a
>[+] sign there).
>
>    So, I would like to get rid of nice-feature-on-point-1.  It is
>nice, yes, but it makes all sorts of people upset because they can not
>use the file manager on their systems.
>
>    Is there any objections to me removing the [+] feature from the
>file manager?
>
>Miguel.
>
>
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