GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 536503
Allow usage of external scanner programs
Last modified: 2013-07-20 10:15:14 UTC
For some use cases, it would make sense to allow an external program provide the disk usage data to baobab (essentially a file list along with file sizes). A simple way to implement that would be providing a command-line interface like this: some_program_providing_a_file_list | baobab --stdin Once that is implemented, one can think about adding the feature to the GUI. I'm probably willing to provide patches, if the baobab authors/maintainers agree that (in principle) a feature they would accept into the codebase. A little bit of info on my exact use case (why *I* want this feature): I have a backup program that stores the inventory of a backup, and allows to retrieve it like this (the actual backup contents might be stored on another host, or be burnt on CD/DVD and tucked away (thus not available to baobab). The backup program can also (for instance) provide a list of files that would be backed up when one would do an incremental backup. Hence the need for ability of analyzing an arbitray list of files.
This would be very useful for sharing the disk usage information. if you need to troll hundresds of TB's, as we do, it takes way too long to do it live. We have methods of creating a file that could be then loaded by multiple people throughout the day.
once baobab gained the ability to load external programs' output (in whichever format it specifies), it could also offer to save an obtained state by saving to the very format baobab expects. concerning situations where this is important, i'd like to add remote listing for high-latency connections (going through a file server's disk usage with a round-trip for every stat makes it unusable; the "scan remote folder" feature could profit from it by checking if an appropriate helper is present server-side and have it pipe all the data instead of walking itself).
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 633293 ***