Re: more bugs....

[Tuomas Kuosmanen <tigert ximian com>]

On Sat, 2002-06-15 at 11:47, Jens Askengren wrote:
    fre 2002-06-14 klockan 23.18 skrev Dave Bordoley:
    
    
    > bug 40048 -- display directory sizes instead of item counts 
    > 
    > Currently we display directory counts. Personally i like these and find
    > them more useful than size counts. 
    
    This is really a blocker if you try to exclusivly use nautilus and no
    terminals in you daily work. 
    
    The item count is totally useless if you ask me. It's lying, cause it's
    not recursive.

Doing recursive directory size counts would be impractically slow since
you'd have infinitely deep structure to walk through. Imagine this on a
slow NFS server for example. You can get a disk usage count for a folder
from the Properties dialog if you wait for a moment.

Also, recursive item count would be a bit strange. Say, for example, my
digital photos folder - it would show "2130 items" which is pretty
arbitary since it is a bunch of subfolders anyway. For me the "useless"
1-level-deep item count serves a few useful purposes:

        * To see if a dir is empty (as simple as it sounds, it is useful
          for cleaning up stuff for example)
        * To do a rough "visual diff" between, say, two directories of
          stuff that might not be in sync. I use this a lot for photos
          again. If my "holiday pics" folder on the firewire disk has
          more items than the one on the NFS server, I know they are not
          in sync yet, thus I need to copy the new ones to the file
          server. Again, nothing accurate or safe-to-assume, but I have
          just found it to be an useful quick check.
        * If your copy of a large dir structure possibly got interrupted
          by some reason (network failure while copying over NFS, system
          crash, whatever) you will quickly see if the copy did *not*
          finish from the different number of items on the source and
          destination folders..
        * I am sure there are more of these, but these come to mind
          right now

Yes, I do move large chunks of stuff around with Nautilus these days.
Like, my homedir to a new laptop using a firewire disk as a temp storage
media. Mount-> Drag-> Unmount-> new machine-> Mount-> Drag-> Drop to
/home on new machine. Yes, it felt strange to do it for the first time
on Linux. But it also worked right, which is great.

Tuomas

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