Re: Fw: [Bug 136055] Changed - When paste a folder with another same name folder, files in original folder will be deleted

[Daniel Borgmann <spark-mailinglists web de>]

On Thu, 2004-03-04 at 11:51, Alexander Larsson wrote:
> On Thu, 2004-03-04 at 09:06, 任延强 wrote:
> > This bug had been reported many times and still in nautilus 2.4.x and
> > 2.5.x. Doesn't anyone think it is a critical problem? 
> 
> Its not obvious that this is a bug, but rather a question of different
> behaviours and what you're used to. Both MacOS and Unix has always had
> the behaviour that nautilus currently has (try doing the same operation
> you did in the shell). Of course, it does give problems for people who
> are used to the way windows does this. Unfortunately a misunderstanding
> about this behaviour can cause loss of data, so its a bit dangerous.
> 
> Maybe we should switch to the window behaviour?

Two thoughts:
1) By default, we can't permanently delete any files without moving them
to the trash first. But when you overwrite a folder, you can
accidentally and permanently wipe out entire directory structures. Once
I had the "great" idea to merge the /usr tree of an old installation
with the /usr tree of my current installation with Nautilus. Didn't work
out all too well. ;)

2) Currently, the functionality of "merging" two folders isn't available
in Nautilus, thus if you actually wanted to do this, you'd have to move
each file in every sub-folder manually. On the other hand, if merge
would be the default, users could still easily reproduce the old
behavior by moving the old folder to the trash before moving the new
folder.

So the Windows behavior seems more functional and safe to me.
Maybe an alternative would be to have a more meaningful dialog which
would offer "Merge" as the default action and "Replace" as the
alternative action? If only one can be chosen, I'd vote for merge for
what it's worth. I'm also wondering if it might be practical to
generally move old files and folders to the trash before replacing them,
then it would be a less dangerous action at least.

Daniel