shundhammer/qdirstat 1.1

New QDirStat Release: 1.1-Pumpkin

on GitHub

Release Announcement

The QDirStat project proudly presents its latest release: QDirStat 1.1-Pumpkin.

This is mostly a bug fix release with some small features thrown in.

It was about time for another official release to get the accumulated fixes and
small changes out into the world. Since the release day was Halloween, this release is named Pumpkin .

The last stable release, V1.0, was in mid-May (2016-05-16). Since then, there
were 5 bug fixes and one small feature (the config file split up into
independent parts so admins can provide presets to their users without
overwriting the complete configuration), all described in greater detail
below.

Changes

• Fixed GitHub issue #32:
  %p does not escape single quotes properly

  If you have a file name like Don't do this.txt (with a quote character in
  the name), the shell used when executing a cleanup action with this would
  complain about unmatched single quotes.

  QDirStat had always escaped such single quotes, but not the way common
  shells (Bash, Zsh) expect it: They don't want a backslash in front of that
  embedded single quote. Rather, you need to terminate the string with a
  single quote, escape the embedded quote with a backslash (or put it into
  double quotes), and then re-open the old string with another single quote.

  Thus, 'Don't do this' becomes 'Don'\''t do this'.

  This is certainly not what most people expect. I just wonder how much other
  software is out there that does it the intuitive (yet wrong) way: Just
  escape the single quote with a backslash ('Don\'t do this').

  Of course, such file names should be avoided entirely, but you can't help
  some slightly broken MP3 ripper program doing it, so it needs to be handled
  correctly.

• Fixed GitHub issue #31:
  Segfault with cleanup action while reading directories

  Now disabling cleanups that have a refresh policy other than "No Refresh"
  while directory reading is in progress; otherwise the re-read when the
  cleanup action has finished clashes with the directory read already in
  progress.

  This is not an optimal solution, but a very pragmatic one; the optimal
  solution might queue updates and execute them after the main read is done.

• Fixed GitHub issue #33:
  Added command line option --slow-update (or -s) for slow remote X connections.

• Fixed GitHub issue #23:

  The internal cache writer would sometimes generate incorrect cache files
  because of buggy URL escaping resulting in an empty file name and thus
  invalid cache file syntax. This affected file names with colons (which is
  weird, but legal).

  One of these days I'm going to throw out all that QUrl stuff and replace the
  few things that I need with something that actually works consistently and
  not just under optimum conditions.

• Fixed GitHub issue #22:

  Cache files containing the root file system would not display correctly or
  segfault under certain conditions. This is now fixed.

• Added "Refresh All" action to the main window tool bar. I had consciously
  avoided that because it's just too tempting to re-read the complete
  directory tree rather than think about what actually might have changed and
  then refresh just that, but it has become so common to use that action in
  web browsers that I found myself missing that more and more. And re-reading
  is not that expensive on today's mainstream PCs.

• Fixed GitHub issue #21:

  When started from a desktop menu, i.e. without any command line parameters,
  QDirStat would not prompt for a directory to read, but read the current
  directory (typically the user's home directory) right away.

• More graceful handling for nonexisting paths specified on the commmand
  line: It now no longer just throws an exception right after starting the
  program (which looks like a crash to the unwary user), but posts an error
  popup instead and then asks for a directory to read.

• Split up config file into four separate ones below ~/.config/QDirStat:

  • QDirStat.conf
  • QDirStat-cleanup.conf
  • QDirStat-exclude.conf
  • QDirStat-mime.conf

  This should make it much easier for site administrators to provide their
  own site-wide cleanup actions, exclude rules, or MIME categories. I did
  this with this in mind:

  http://moo.nac.uci.edu/~hjm/kdirstat/kdirstat-for-clusters.html

  Here, they describe how users should overwrite their KDirStat config file
  with one provided by the site admin so all users have those carefully
  crafted cleanup actions. But that also means that all other settings get
  lost each time there is a change in any of those commands, and users have
  to update that config file again.

  With the latest change, it is now possible to only replace the cleanup
  action config (QDirStat-cleanup.conf) and leave everything else untouched.

  Notice that this is far from a perfect solution; all cleanup actions the
  user added himself still get lost. But doing this perfectly might pretty
  quickly become an overengineered solution that would be hard to understand
  for everybody.

  As for migration from previous single-file configurations, QDirStat does
  that automatically: It reads the single file and moves the respective parts
  where they belong. No need to bother with any migration scrips or anything
  like that.