[Unity-design] Fwd: What do we do with the file manager?

[Robert Park]

On Thu, Aug 9, 2012 at 11:15 AM, Sebastien Bacher <seb128 at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> Le 09/08/2012 17:05, Michael Terry a écrit :
>> I don't think we have the energies to own a whole file manager.  I vote we
>> just ride along with GNOME on this one and patch it to fit better when
>> running under Unity.

THIS. I think we already have a bad reputation for forking things
needlessly. My vote is to cooperate as much as possible with upstream
and have only minimal patches. I realize that not everybody agrees on
every change that is made, but we really need to get over ourselves
and get better at cooperating if we're going to succeed. We'll never
resolve https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/1 if we decide that the
world really does need 5 different forks of Nautilus.

> - I'm not sure what to think about things like the dropping of compact view
> or extra pane mode...

I've been using the new Nautilus and I really like it quite a bit. I
don't miss extra pane view at all, I feel like the improvements made
to the breadcrumb trail have totally supplanted extra pane view.
Here's a common use-case I find myself in all the time: I unpack a
tarball containing half a dozen files into a directory, of which I
only care about one. So I want to move that one out of the directory,
then delete the directory. With extra pane view, you have to navigate
both panes, then drag the file across, then close the pane and delete
the directory. With the breadcrumb trail, you just enter the
directory, drag the file to the breadcrumb representing the parent
dir, then from there you can directly right click on the breadcrumb
representing the current dir and select 'move to trash'. Overall it's
a significant reduction in both number of clicks, and distance
required to move the mouse. I think it's brilliant!

As for compact view, well, the justification was that they were going
to make list view get better to encompass that functionality, so if
that's the case then I think it was kind of ass-backwards to delete
compact view before improving list view. Fortunately the upstream git
commits are quite cleanly organized so it shouldn't be too difficult
to just revert that one commit that removes compact view, and maintain
that as a patch until we see what happens to list view.

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