Re: Why @#! is not Emacs using the Recycle bin on w32?

[Taylor Venable <taylor@metasyntax.net>]

On Fri, 29 Aug 2008 22:08:32 +0200
"Lennart Borgman (gmail)" <lennart.borgman@gmail.com> wrote:

> Taylor Venable wrote:
> > Maybe, assuming you have a Trash.  But where is it?  It could be the
> > one that Nautilus uses, or the one that Konqueror uses.  If you
> > don't use GNOME or KDE you probably don't have a Trash.  Then what
> > is the point of moving things there?
> 
> Is this really true?
> 
> Someone said that trash cans are something that belongs to the shell.
> On w32 that is fortunately true only in a very limited sense. You can
> do file deletions without using the trash can and you must use what I
> believe MS call "shell api".
> 
> However it comes with the system! That is the important point. And of
> course such a component should follow with the system so that
> different shell developers s does not invent the wheel again. (Doing
> that may create a lot of work for other people.)
> 
> Why not try to take that up with the GNU/Linux developers?

The simple answer is because the GNU/Linux (or rather, Unix in general)
architecture does not operate like Windows does with respect to this
tight level of integration.  Even getting the GNOME and KDE guys to use
the same place would not solve the problem because a user always has
the freedom to use another environment (or write their own) which might
not conform.  You cannot second-guess that such high-level features
will be available in a Unix environment because we are much more free
to do as we will in such a system.

Besides, because of the way Unix systems are compartmentalized,
implementing such a thing in a universal way would take an impossible
amount of work.  Who should decide where your files go when they die?
At the most fundamental point this is a filesystem decision; but then
your editor would work differently according to what filesystem you
were using.  You might make the argument that you already get this
effect if you try to open a file on a read-only medium like a CD, but
that precedent is already well established, and using different hard-
disk filesystems is far more subtle.

-- 
Taylor Venable            http://real.metasyntax.net:2357/

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