Subject: bug#44273: "total used in directory 19 available 5.2 GiB"

From: Lars Ingebrigtsen <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 28 Oct 2020 12:02:06 +0100

Mattias Engdegård <[email-masked]> writes:

> I'm all for removing it, but there is the usual howling crowd
> insisting that it is indispensable and highly meaningful on their
> machine and how dare we even think of changing anything in Emacs. Good
> luck.

:-)  That's quite common, yes, and sometimes it's justified, even.

> That's why bug#36729 was closed as wontfix. (This is a duplicate.)

I didn't see any howling in that bug report, though?  I just skimmed it
quickly.

As an aside: The general design of dired is frustrating.  Dumping
whatever the system "ls" gives us into a buffer and then trying to make
do isn't a good approach.

The argument that Tramp needs to parse "ls" output is valid, and that
"ls" is faster than `ls-lisp' is, too, but it's still backwards: Dired
should take a well-defined data structure and then render it according
to however the user wants.

The data can come from `ls-lisp', but it could also come from "ls": We
just need to write a parser that parses the data.  That's infinitely
more viable than the gazillion tweaks we've added to dired to do the
right thing if "-F" adds "@" at the end or not, etc etc etc.  All the
nasty parsing stuff would be contained to a single parsing function and
not infest all of dired.

Anyway.  Implementing this is left as a weekend project for somebody.  :-)

-- 
(domestic pets only, the antidote for overdose, milk.)
   bloggy blog: http://lars.ingebrigtsen.no