[Bug 34247] Re: Trash always empty.

[Robert Lange]

To reiterate, my problem is that trash does not work for my home
directory. The problem is with both the Trash Applet and Nautilus. If I
mount a floppy or a USB stick or whatever, trash works correctly for
those mounts. However, trash will not work for my home directory.

I have NOT tried deactivating dbus as some other posters suggested. Even
if that "works" it would cause so many other problems that I don't
consider it a solution.

*****
NOTE: My home directory is a part of the / partition, NOT mounted as a separate partition. If I get some free time, I will do a fresh install on a new machine with /home as its own partition. Based on my observations, I hypothesize that setup would work correctly.
*****

Based on the code I have examined as it was executing, both of those
applications are working correctly. Gnome-vfs is feeding them the wrong
information.

For example, Nautilus makes a call to determine which mount points must
be monitored for garbage and what directory to monitor for each mount
point. (libnautilus-private/nautilus-trash-monitor.c:
nautilus_trash_monitor_get_trash_directories) This function tells
Nautilus that the / partition (and therefore my home directory) does not
handle trash. Why? Because it in turn calls (libgnomevfs/gnome-vfs-
volume.c: gnome_vfs_volume_handles_trash) for each mount point. This
function reports that the / partition does not handle trash. So at this
point I think I have proven that the error is in gnome-vfs, not
Nautilus.

So why does the (gnome_vfs_volume_handles_trash) function report
erroneously? The function gets the filesystem type from the
GnomeVFSVolume input data structure and passes it to the function
(libgnomevfs/gnome-vfs-filesystem-type.c:
_gnome_vfs_filesystem_use_trash) which performs a lookup against a table
of known filesystem types. For the / partition the filesystem type is
listed as "rootfs" which is not found in the table. Therefore, the
function assumes that the / mount must not be able to handle trash.

One kludgy solution would be to add "rootfs" to the lookup table and
have it return true. However, this solution would be wrong, as the /
partition should not handle user trash anytime the /home directory is
mounted in another partition. The only way to find a real solution is to
find out why the / mount is listed as "rootfs" rather than as "ext3". To
do this, we need to find where the GnomeVFSVolume data structures are
being generated. For unix systems, they are generated based on
GnomeVFSUnixMount structures, which are generated in libgnomevfs/gnome-
vfs-unix-mounts.c. I think in comment 37 I documented the diagnosis
pretty clearly, although I still don't have much time to work on it
further.

-- 
Trash always empty.
https://launchpad.net/bugs/34247