Re: interface to ask is a file is hidden

[Josef Bacik <jbacik@redhat.com>]

On Fri, Oct 10, 2008 at 09:22:11PM +0200, Nicolò Chieffo wrote:
> Recently there have been a discussion between the nautilus & GIO
> maintainer, and the ntfs-3g maintainer to implement a way to not show
> files in nautilus if they are hidden.
> 
> Currently only files starting with a "." are hidden, as you can see in
> the GIO _g_local_file_info_get()
> 
> if (basename != NULL && basename[0] == '.')
>    g_file_info_set_is_hidden (info, TRUE);
> 
> Of course, since we often have a multi-OS & multi-filesystem
> environment, it is a big limitation to consider hidden files only
> those files.
> There are some use cases in which we need a wider view of hidden files:
> - ntfs shared partitions & external disks
> - fat32 shared partitions & external disks
> - fat16 usb keys/multimedia devices
> 
> Both the maintainers state that it's not a good idea to patch GIO to
> check which filesystem is hosting the file, and then ask it using the
> specific driver whether the file is hidden or not.
> Everything should be transparent for GIO, which should only make one
> call to a standard interface, that all filesystem drivers shall
> implement.
> 
> Is it possible to consider this request?
> The discussion is in this moment hosted in the nautilus mailing list
> with this subject name: "nautilus & hidden files".
>

What files are determined as "hidden" is completely up to the application, and
not the filesystem.  Every linux filesystem is going to return all entries in a
directory when you do a readdir, and then it is up to the app to cull which
entries it doesn't want.  Having the fs/vfs arbitrarily decide which files are
"hidden" and shouldn't be returned via readdir is not the correct way to tackle
this problem, it should be decided via the application.

Josef 
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