GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 155474
visual feedback of insufficient permissions would be useful
Last modified: 2008-01-13 12:07:46 UTC
We got following feedback from user: Comment From James Lee: As a non-root user, if you try to copy from your own folder and paste to one of the system folders you are simply not allowed to paste - paste function is greyed out. Talking with non-experienced Linux users I found that they actually thought the copy-and-paste fuction was broken. I think we can improve the user experience on this by alarming them that they are not ALLOWED to paste files there. So that they can contact system administrator for further help and etc.
Enhancement suggestion: I think, that current behavior is OK. There is no reason to enable menu items, which will surely fail. But it is true, that user has no direct evidence, that directory is not writable. I think, that better solution is a "write-disabled" icon for all files and directories without write permission for current user (as is already implemented for unreadable directories) and the same icon somewhere inside window (e. g. in bottom status bar).
nautilus already use emblems on such directories. What version of nautilus do you use?
GNOME 2.10 Emblems are visible only for subdirectories of opened directory, not for actually opened directory. How to repeat. Ctrl+L -> Select / You have visual feedbac, that /root is not readable, but you don't see status of /.
where do you want to use these emblems?
I can imagine following alternatives: - location_button menu icon in status bar - left or right side of status bar
Wouldn't it be much better if we prompted the user for a password and allow him/her to do the operation. If not, even if the user has the root password and wants to really write to that dir, there is no way to do it.
It is not needed in all situations. Program has to check, whether user has permission to change permissions (in this case open directory Properties->Permissions), whether root can permission to do write access (ask for root password for read-write media and display error for read-only and root_squash media). Probably also clicking to noaccess directories (like /root) should ask for password. But this solution has some drawbacks: - For browser window, it is not clean, when permissions should be dropped. - Nautilus will require libgnomesu or so. - From BFU point of view, the most probable case is trying to drop something into /home/other_user/something (where using of root password is a bad practice) or CD-ROM (where it is not possible).
See also bug 137515. One alternative I can imagine is a Firefox-style "info" bar at the top or bottom of the Nautilus icon view, that gives you informational messages like: /!\ You cannot write to this directory, because you do not have permissions [X] It sounds like several GNOME apps are moving towards these types of UI elements as it is, and they seem to work well for lots of people with firefox. See also bug 137515.
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 490200 ***