[Thunar-dev] why move takes so long

[sofar]

On Fri, 13 Jan 2006 11:15:44 -0300, hernux <hernux at etherac.com.ar> wrote:
> You may be right, this way may be safer, but the cost is too high.. 

Please remember Thunar is in development stage - Benny is working on maybe 20 different parts of thunar and does a great job at it too - but he's not (insert favorite superhero) either, and some code components will get a lower priority.

> In the other hand, I can't find any reason why cp would be safer than 
> mv... they work just the same.. the only difference is that mv is not 
> really coping, and that de original file is not anymore at the end... 
> so.. if you want to avoid overriding, in both cases you need the -i 
> param... and you can always check the existence of files to be 
> overwritten before calling mv.
> 
> I haven't seen the code, but I guess that he is not calling system cp/mv 
> commands.. so, implementation may be different from what I said before.. 

Calling a shell command to do mv/cp from a C program is kind of awkward, and often a bad thing - you have no idea what is happening while a copy is progressing for instance. In any case a proper implementation in C is not as simple as you think, which is why the current code is 'as is'.

> but any case.. I think that if the problem with move is the safety, then 
> the rename function should be changed, cause, after all, renaming and 
> moving are the same..  :-)
> 
> Any way, Benedikt already said that "this will be fixed before the 
> release", so, I think that he is saying that its not a feature to copy 
> instead of moving.

Copy+Delete is a safe (and quick to write) way to implement "move" for now, it will be replaced later with more sophisticated code, because it's the right thing. For now Thunar is a moving target that might not be able to compile or run at any point, and can break your system. Such is life for a alpha/beta project like Thunar.

Also, Please quote at the top, not at the bottom - it is unclear what/who you are replying too.

Auke