Nautilus ate my customer's website

[Le grand pinguin]

On Tue, Dec 07, 2004 at 02:31:16PM +1100, Matthew Davidson wrote:
> On Mon, 2004-12-06 at 13:25 +0000, Jon Dixon wrote:
> > If you've just 'discovered' something, wouldn't it be wiser to try it
> > in a non-production environment first?
> > 
> If it's in a "stable" distro you should be reasonably confident that an
> application isn't going to destroy files that you haven't even asked it
> to touch.

Yes, you should. Nobody ever denied that. But: so far you haven't shown us 
that this incident war really caused by nautilus' ftp feature (anyway, doesn't
it just use GNOME's virtual filesystem?).
It might as well be: a problem with the ftp server, some data locking (or
permission bits on the data directory), or, horrors, you clicking the wrong
button :-0


> I'm sorry if I've been a bit tetchy, but I'm pretty appalled at people's
> reactions to what seems to be a critical problem.  

Luckily, people here don't tend to panic. I'm pretty shure that, once you
can show that this actually was caused by nautilus the reactions will change.

> "Backup your data,"
> "use a command line FTP client," or "it'll be fixed in Hoary," is not an
> acceptable response.  I'm putting together systems for non-technical (by
> GNU/Linux standards) users based on Warty.  Warty is supposed to be
> stable, it's supposed to be useable by non-technical users, and if the
> only GUI FTP client in the default installation (built into the file
> manager, no less!) has a show-stopping bug, that's a major problem in my
> book.  
> 
> When Microsoft says "it'll be fixed in Longhorn," people are justifiably
> outraged.  I can't do the same to my users.
> 
> Anyway, I can't get a detailed idea of what's going on, since this
> website is hosted with someone who doesn't allow shell access.  

My god, just call up the provider and ask for the server log - in such
circumstances ther shouldn't be any problem (quite opposit to common lore
sysadmins can be very helpfull :).
By the way, one more question: how exactly _did_ you unmount the ftp site?


> I've
> patched up the site using another FTP client, and hopefully no permanent
> damage has been done.  The file truncation problem I mentioned in my
> original post seems to be an unrelated issue.  I'll try to duplicate the
> rest of the behaviour on a machine where I can actually see what's going
> on, and I'll file a bug report if successful.

Sounds like a good idea.

Cheers 
 
   Ralf Mattes
> 
> Matthew.
> 
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