Before the bug comes...

Hi I notice from Transifex new warning strings (240 & 241) about “Parent directory” of a shared folder. Don’t you feel this would be puzzeling newb users that mainly already use a general purpose directory as the main location for mostly all their folder shares. I even wander if even all targets are created at the top of a tree (say / on nuxes or any x:\ on winses) this will trigger the warn ?

It’s not about having a parent directory. It’s about having a shared folder in /a/b and another in /a/b/c. We already warned in one direction (adding a child underneath an existing folder), those strings are about warning in the other (adding a parent above existing folders).

Oh yes, I guess I see. So the warning should only be triggered on “Save” click with a warn/confirm popup. It should not be triggered on the fly when browsing to the target as the yet existing warning does, because as I said, browsing through /a/ (unshared) to create new /a/c/ beside yet shared /a/b/ would trigger the warn as soon as selecting “directory” /a/ (this is just inferred by reading the string ad litteram).

Ah, I see your point. We don’t have any popups like that, so the warning is on the field. While you are in the process of filling it out it will indicate that the path you have typed so far is a parent of something else. (If it is.) This is similar to when you’re adding a device for example. When typing the device ID, it’ll keep showing the indication that the device ID is invalid until it is in fact valid.

Well Jakob, I never met this very scenario, and I guess why : the ID hashes being generated randomly, there is few chance we meet this warning on the first B32 character of the ID, and even fewer as long as we type following characters. But for directories, browsing through a main directory intended for shares will then immediately trigger the warning, what will surely puzzle newbies. I must admit this puzzle will be dramatically increased by the way I translated the strings for yet existing strings for subdir warns : “WARNING, this path is a subdirectory of existing Folder Share “{{otherFolder}}”. This could drive you in issues like unwanted files duplications and/or deletions”. Okay, I will rephrase the parent warn 2 strings ~something like~ “You choose a dir that is parent of yet shared dir(s). You would make sure won’t save the config before you create a path outside a shared dir, or you may meet issues like…”. Also the warns for subdir would overide the ones for parent as soon as condition is met, isn’t it ? I’m not skilled enough to see how you coded this.

Thank you to you and Audrius and all contributors for the great job.

The two are different.

If you have a folder in /a/b and add a new one in /a/b/c you will get the “is a subdirectory” warning.

If you have a folder in /a/b and add a new one in /a you will get the “is a parent” warning. If you save that and then open the /a/b folder, that folder will now have a “is a subdirectory” warning.

I don’t think there is any need to give recommendations about “before saving” and so on in the field warning. It is just a note, and it goes away when the user has typed something that is not a parent to an existing folder.

Done this way : “Warning, this path is a parent of existing “{{otherFolderLabel}}” ({{otherFolder}}). If you go on, make sure to create a new subdir, as not doing that would drive in unwanted files duplications and/or deletions.” What about ? Do you just show the first “{{otherFolderLabel}}” ({{otherFolder}}) you meet if there are more than one ?

My concern is newbies won’t be puzzeled by any warning when not needed. Maybe I misunderstand the way it will work … let’s wait and see :wink: Maybe the parent warns would be orange, when subdir ones are red

Seen ! It works the way I guessed : the parent warn triggers even from top of / along with /home/, /home/me/, /home/me/Sync/ where are lying most of my shares (I did unshare “Default” from the very beginning I use ST and use ~/Sync as main folder for real repos) as soon as I hit any yet existing / in the path.

Added to the fact bug #3433 still exists, I feel this makes too much warnings for nothing. Note I can mitigate them for myself, but I think to newbs for who first “Folder” creation will be intimidating.

I feel like the UX here would be improved if the message linked out to some sort of explanation of the types of issues that can arise. I’ve been googling around trying to find out what can happen that I need to worry about and I can’t find it. This is also the type of thing that hits me at my typical use-case: I want to sync a bunch of stuff generally between main machines, but then there are subfolders of that which I share for more niche purposes (e.g., smartphone gets a subfolder).

Yeah that’d be great, anyone who wants to write that doc article is welcome to. As far as I can think of there’s only one case where really bad things will happen: when you have two folders (say A and B) and they are mapped like /A/B on one side (B is a child of A) and like /B/A on the other (A is a child of B). Otherwise things will work without disasters.

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Have a look at french translation :slight_smile:

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Also noticed https://docs.syncthing.net/users/faq.html#am-i-able-to-nest-shared-folders-in-syncthing - anyhow, at least this forum thread comes up in a Google search on the warning text.