Re: freedesktop.org compliance, trashcan

[James Henstridge <james jamesh id au>]

Maurizio Colucci wrote:

> Hello,
>
> I am programming a file manager (http://onefinger.sf.net) and I would 
> like to share my trashcan with the one used by gnome. I am running 
> gnome 2.8 on debian sid and I noticed the directory used by gnome as 
> the "home trash directory" is ~/.Trash. This does not seem compliant 
> with the freedesktop.org specification:
>
>   http://www.ramendik.ru/docs/trashspec.html

The most obvious reason is that Nautilus's trash handling code was 
written before that draft was started.  Since the spec might change 
before everyone agrees on it, it doesn't make sense to roll out such a 
change given that it will be replaced soon after.

> , according to which the dir should be ~/.local/Trash (since 
> $XDG_DATA_HOME is not defined on my system).
>
> I would like to know your position about this. :-)

The differences between the new trashspec and what Nautilus currently do 
differ more than just in the location where trashed files are stored.  
The new trashspec also stores some metadata about the file (previous 
filename relative to trash dir, deletion time, etc).

Also, note that Nautilus doesn't have a single trash directory -- it 
will attempt to create trash directories on every volume it can write 
to, so that moving files the trash doesn't cause data to be copied.

The code used to find a trash directory for a particular location, and 
code to detect when new volumes are mounted is available in gnome-vfs.  
If you want a non-Nautilus example of this code, take a look at the 
trash applet from gnome-applets (in particular, trash-monitor.c).

James.