Comments on: OSX: fuck you (it’s about moving folder)!

By: luca maioli

luca maioli — Sat, 04 Nov 2006 18:57:44 +0000

folders are nodes but (special) files too (in the BSD layer, I can’t remember exactly), so I think it’s right to completely overwrite them. Anyway I was thinking about this post and I come up with a solution (because I like the overwrite thing): let the user choose beetwen merge and overwrite. This whould improve greatly the user experience, IMHO.

BTW in osx you can easily workaround this by using the spring folder feature, placing subfolder wherever you want.

By: baldo

baldo — Fri, 03 Nov 2006 15:10:09 +0000

Folders are not files. Files should be overwritted. Folder contents should be merged.

this is my view.. but maybe it’s forced by 10 years of Windows use..

By: luca maioli

luca maioli — Fri, 03 Nov 2006 13:31:42 +0000

This is not exactly smart, or useful but it is linear. Windows perform a merge and mac osx perform a clear and rewrite. the same as

rm -r MOVIES
cp /pathToOtherMovies/MOVIES .

So it’s not strange, It’s just different. If you want to replace the folder you do replace everything. I think it’s a good deal ;-), you get exactly what you asked.

By: baldo

baldo — Thu, 02 Nov 2006 20:08:29 +0000

yea.. mediamixture, you are right.. AND another big problem is that the overwrittten folder is just deleted and not in the trash..

By: mediamixture

mediamixture — Thu, 02 Nov 2006 19:18:47 +0000

Yeah, that’s pretty weird. I would argue that both OS’s should not even ask the question for this situation. With this example, there isn’t even a naming conflict so why can’t it merge the files without any user input? In the event there is a filename conflict, why not defer the resolution until the end of the copy process so that I don’t need to sit there and wait for the next question to answer. Even if I chose not to deal with it at that moment, there’s no reason why the OS couldn’t just track those duplicate files so that I could just figure out which one I really wanted at some point in the future.

To me, it just seems like file systems should be smart enough these days to handle this gracefully.

By: baldo

baldo — Wed, 01 Nov 2006 11:09:28 +0000

yea.. when my mac is in sleeping mode, he watches my episodes.. :)

By: Davide

Davide — Wed, 01 Nov 2006 08:19:45 +0000

looks like mac has already watched epi1-3…just joking,
actually a strange behaviour