Recycle Bin functionality at the file system level

[gloryandel]

1. Primarily serving as the backend for file sharing services like FTP, WebDAV, SMB, NFS, and cloud storage applications such as Nextcloud.

2. The goal is to enable all applications utilizing MergerFS to indirectly support a recycle bin functionality.

3. This makes even a single-branch MergerFS highly appealing, as it can function effectively as a recycle bin.

Currently, only Samba supports the Recycle Bin feature in file sharing.

[Waester]

This does not sound doable, how would each program differentiate between a normal delete and "trashing" a file in system call level?
This sound more like a function for the upper layer applications themselves to implement. MergerFS is simply a union of filesystems, and should stay as such.

[trapexit]

@Waester It's really not hard. mergerfs would simply respond to unlink requests and follow the freedesktop trash standard. A first draft would be everything but once I have a toml or similar config file that can be more expressive you could have it respond depending the the part of the filesystem tree or even name/ext of file. Could even do it based on the executable name or other attributes though that would be more expensive to determine.

[Waester]

Taking a second time to re-read what @gloryandel wrote, I think I misunderstood what was written.
In my mind I read it, and interpret, as "rewrite the remove() system call to function as a recycle bin for ALL applications". That would be disastrous, imagine temp and cache files certain applications generate and remove frequently never actually getting removed and simply binned by MergerFS.
Getting late for me, carry on.

[trapexit]

That's mostly what they mean. Every unlink and rmdir is treated like a freedesktop trash like you were using some desktop filemanager that defaults to "trash" rather than actual unlink/rmdir.

[RokerHRO]

@Waester + @trapexit : You're both right. Recycle bin functionality is not mergerfs's main business. OTOH it seems to be easily implementable, so … if it is the case, why not? It would be an optional feature and who doesn't like it, would not activate it.