Re: [Pcmanfm-develop] concerning a compact and reliable key-value database: (rw)cdb

[<u-...@ae...>]

Hello Andriy,

On Thu, Nov 07, 2013 at 07:08:03PM +0200, Andrej N. Gritsenko wrote:
> >> 3) settings are specific to the machine, you cannot share settings for
> >>     the same folder over your office or whatever;

> >Unclear what you mean here. My (and many others') home directory is
> >available on all machines I am using, with the same shared contents. A

> Well, you have folder ~/Video available on machine A and you set it to
> use Thumbnails View mode. On machine B you have default view mode as
> Detailed List View. You can get that folder opened on the machine B as
> sftp://A/home/user/Video. Guess how it will be shown on machine B? If you

The problem you describe is easily overcome by explicitly changing the
settings for the path where the "auxiliary folder" is connected. Then
the setting will be accurate as it will reflect both the data properties
_and_ the properties of the terminal being used to view the data.

Even if you would store the metadata inside each directory you should tag
it with all the relevant variables like "terminal" (the screen instance
with its particilarities), "user" (as the preferences will vary depending
on who is looking at that directory) and possibly even more.

While storing the metadata per-user you have to also tag it with "unit"
i.e. which external disk instance or which computer the data is located
at.

(To ease the maintenance of the metadata you might also encourage the
user to synchronize the metadata database between her home directories
on different computers)

> code again. I'm heavily against any code bloating as I said, I stay on
> the KISS principle - if that cannot be done simply then it should not be
> done at all.

Then I would say there should be one single and easily temporarily
changeable folder view preference, common for all folders, like this is
done in Rox-filer. Easy to implement, easy to understand for the user.

The idea of adding metadata to each directory is just calling for
a lot of effort and "code bloat" to make it even "good enough".

Thanks for taking up this discussion but it looks like the feature
would in any case somewhat "bloat" the file manager, both in code,
memory _and_ the complexity of the UI. In my eyes this is hardly worth
a functionality which quite certainly can be surprising and irritating
for some of the users (creating extra files as soon as a directory is
writable? no thanks!  oh, did I have to change something in Preferences
to avoid this?? too late...)

Please use your time not for this challenge but for other ones
around LXDE, there are many which may help users more.

> I just like the Ukrainian language a bit more, that's all. :)

:)

Regards,
Rune