alt Hacker NewsSorry for the small digression. It's on topic.
Just a few minutes ago, while copying 63 GB worth of pics and videos from my phone to my laptop, KDE forwarded me the error "File <hard to retain name.jpg> could not be opened. Retry, Ignore, Ignore all, Cancel".
This was around file 7000 out of 15000. The file transfer stopped until I made a choice.
As a user, what am I supposed to do with such a popup?
It seems like a very good example of "Eror Handling Without Purpose" as the article describes, but at user level.
Except that here, the audience is "a plain user who just dragged a folder to make a copy" and none of the four options (or even the act of stopping the file transfer until an answer is chosen) is actually meaningful for the user.
The "Putting It Together" for this scenario should look like: a non-modal section populates with "file <hard to retain name.jpg> failed due to reason; at the end of the file transfer you'll get a list with all the files that failed, and you'll have an option to retry them, navigate to their source position to double-check, and/or ignore".
Replies
This design still doesn't work: what if the user walks away and the computer is powered off in the meantime?
I.e. you need to write the report of this to a file itself. In fact you should allocate a decently large file upfront to make sure you can write the report and the error message (out of disk space for example).
> As a user, what am I supposed to do with such a popup?
Change the floppy disk. In the MSDOS days those messages were useful, as read errors might be caused by having the wrong floppy in the drive. The OS had no way to know when the floppy was changed and "Retry" allowed you to swap the disks back and try again. In modern days it is less useful, the behavior just got carried over.
Windows addresses this issue somewhat by scanning the directory tree before the actual copying starts, this can catch some errors before they happen and gives you better progress reporting on top.
But a single dialog that keeps track of the whole copy/move operations, not a modal dialog attached to individual read/write calls would be the way to go here. This is a case of the GUI sticking to close to what the OS is doing instead of what the user intended to do.