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.

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 ?!

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?!