The Problem

GNOME displays a trash bin icon on the desktop. Dropping files there seems to make them vanish. The trash bin always seems empty. Alas, the files dropped there are still consuming space in the user's home directory, and consuming the user's home quota.

What happens

The files are moved into ~/.Trash as they should be. However, GNOME is clever and knows that there can not be a trash bin in AFS. Here's some code from gnome-vfs-2.16.0/libgnomevfs/gnome-vfs-filesystem-type.c:

struct FSInfo {
        char *fs_type;
        char *fs_name;
        gboolean use_trash;
};

/* NB: Keep in sync with gnome_vfs_volume_get_filesystem_type()
 * documentation! */
static struct FSInfo fs_data[] = {
        { "affs"     , N_("AFFS Volume"), 0},
        { "afs"      , N_("AFS Network Volume"), 0 },
        { "auto"     , N_("Auto-detected Volume"), 0 },
        { "cd9660"   , N_("CD-ROM Drive"), 0 },
        { "cdda"     , N_("CD Digital Audio"), 0 },
        { "cdrom"    , N_("CD-ROM Drive"), 0 },
        { "devfs"    , N_("Hardware Device Volume"), 0 },
        { "encfs"    , N_("EncFS Volume"), 1 },
        { "ext2"     , N_("Ext2 Linux Volume"), 1 },
        { "ext2fs"   , N_("Ext2 Linux Volume"), 1 },

Well Known Problem

See these reports from 2004:

http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=157259

http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=157260

Possible Solutions

• patching the gnome-vfs2 package and rebuilding it is trivial:

  --- gnome-vfs-2.16.0/libgnomevfs/gnome-vfs-filesystem-type.c.orig
  +++ gnome-vfs-2.16.0/libgnomevfs/gnome-vfs-filesystem-type.c
  @@ -37,7 +37,7 @@
    * documentation! */
   static struct FSInfo fs_data[] = {
          { "affs"     , N_("AFFS Volume"), 0},
  -       { "afs"      , N_("AFS Network Volume"), 0 },
  +       { "afs"      , N_("AFS Network Volume"), 1 },
          { "auto"     , N_("Auto-detected Volume"), 0 },
          { "cd9660"   , N_("CD-ROM Drive"), 0 },
          { "cdda"     , N_("CD Digital Audio"), 0 },

• maybe we could binary-patch /usr/lib[64]/libgnomevfs-2.so ?!
• remove the trashbin fom GNOME desktops
  • alas, this is not possible - at least, there's no way to remove the "move to trash" entry from context menus

Unwanted Side Effects ?

See http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=137282 for example. While it does not seem to cache /afs in ~/.gnome/gnome-vfs/.trash_entry_cache at least on EL5: Are we sure we know what we're doing?!

Recommendation to users

Don't use the GNOME trashbin. If you do, clean out ~/.Trash regularly.