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List:       kde-usability
Subject:    Re: [Patch] #29984 Change file permission using octal numbers
From:       Uno Engborg <uno () webworks ! se>
Date:       2003-05-18 14:18:54
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Alexander Kellett wrote:

>On Fri, May 16, 2003 at 10:14:59AM -0600, Aaron J. Seigo wrote:
>  
>
>> o Scott is correct in thinking that most who do not already know octal 
>>permission values will see it as line noise. no, the majority of people will 
>>not notice that clicking write adds 2 to a certain digit in the pattern.
>>    
>>
>
>the human brain has no problem with automatically
>ignoring information it can't understand. its the
>complexity/size of the dialog that should be in 
>question, not the addition of a few "guru" fields.
>
>  
>
>> o It's poor UI design in that it connects one widget (The line edit) with a 
>>set of other widgets with no visible corelation. sure, changing values of one 
>>set of widgets affects the value of another, but since this is done by an 
>>internal mathematical transformation, it doesn't provide a stronger linkage.
>>    
>>
>
>well, good labelling would solve this completely.
>you can't possibly strengthen the link in this case.
>
>  
>
>> o It doesn't provide any new information or even a substantially better way 
>>to access the information that is there. Since it *mirrors* information, 
>>rather than presents unique information, the odds are high that it will be 
>>confusing for some, innexplicable for others, a novelty for others and useful 
>>for remarkably few.
>>    
>>
>
>well. i know for certain that plenty of kde users
>will be reading about unix permissions anyway, given
>thats thats there platform in any case. in fact, in
>a fair few cases i'm sure that they will be asked
>by a tutorial / howto to change the permissions of 
>a given file to "0755". frankly this "mirrored" info
>is gonna be damn to useful to such people. or isn't
>konqi meant to be a partial shell replacement anymore?
>
>anyways. yay for a completely redesign as long as
>it also incorporates this useful addition.
>

If we think of redesigning this dialog, we should also take ACLs into 
account. They are becomming more and more
common in the Unix world,  and could also be useful for changeing 
permissions on samba mounted windows NTFS file
systems. 

Back to octal permissions. You have a point in that Unix documentation 
often uses  the octal notation.
But people reading that kind of documentation  have usually passed the 
beginners stage, so I'm not sure
we need an input field for octal values.


By the way, do we have any GUI way to set umask in KDE?


Regards
Uno Engborg

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