Re: Baobab

[Alex Jones <alex weej com>]

Hi

On Wed, 2006-07-26 at 12:50 +0100, Emmanuele Bassi wrote:
> Hi;
> 
> On Wed, 2006-07-26 at 12:29 +0100, Alex Jones wrote:
> > Hi Davyd
> > 
> > Interesting to see that approach to portraying disk usage. Personally,
> > however, I feel that anyone really wanting this kind of software would
> > probably prefer to use something like Graphical Disk Map
> > <http://gdmap.sourceforge.net/>.
> 
> Treemap view is supported by Baobab too, but it's not its major feature
> - which is a nice integration with Nautilus and (now) with the Search
> tool.

The treemap in GDMap really is much more usable. Perhaps we should port
the logic. I think they call it a cushioned treemap or something,
because it manages to make squares (as best it can), not rectangles! As
a result, you don't see thick black lines all over the place where a
file's representation is of proportions 40:1. Also the colouring is much
easier to analyse. Each colour in GDMap represents a file type, so you
can see if you have a massive folder of videos somewhere very easily!

Just some ideas...

> > As an outsider to this whole process, though, I'm not sure I totally
> > understand why applications have to be bundled into packages of vaguely
> > related software like this. Can't distributions make their own minds up?
> 
> First, do read the thread about the inclusion of Baobab:
> 
>   http://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2006-April/msg00112.html
> 
> The decision to add it to gnome-utils was due to the fact that Baobab is
> a little utility, with a code base small enough not to require its own
> package (it did have its own package, though, as it was already shipped
> by Ubuntu and Debian before the inclusion); it was also actively
> maintained at the time of inclusion (the latest release of gdmap is
> dated December 2005).
> 
> The GNOME Utilities package is a small package that GNOME has kept since
> the 1.x era (and before); it provides some application other than
> baobab, like the screenshoter, the file search dialog, the dictionary
> and the system log viewer, that are not sufficiently big to warrant
> their own package but at the same time are considered part of the basic
> offering of GNOME itself.

I understand. Thanks

> Ciao,
>  Emmanuele (gnome-utils co-maintainer).
> 
-- 
Alex Jones <alex weej com>