I’ve noticed something that I would consider a bug, but which some may disagree with, so I would like to raise it here first.
In Dolphin (and similar places like the Desktop), if you right-click on a folder, especially one with lots of subfolders, and choose Properties, the byte count in the Size entry includes the size on disk that the directory entries contain. I suppose that is technically correct, but I would argue that most people would expect the Size value to be the sum of the individual file sizes only.
In particular, if you copy a folder from a Linux filesystem (e.g. btrfs) to a FAT32-formatted USB stick, the total size of a folder will seem larger, as FAT directory entries seem to have a minimum size of 32k or something. This means that if I copy a folder like this, from a btrfs volume:
5.0 GiB (5,336,728,023)
147 files, 18 sub-folders
it might show up as this on the FAT32 volume:
5.0 GiB (5,337,345,097)
147 files, 18 sub-folders
This makes it annoying when you want to do a quick check that everything has copied correctly. I realise that to properly check one would have to recursively use checksums or something, but it annoys me that I can’t just use the sum of the individual file sizes as a quick sanity check!
I suppose counting the size on disk including the size of the individual directory entries might be useful to some people, but I would suggest that it’s not as useful as you might think. Generally speaking, it’s a very small percentage of the size, and as I say, will vary on different filesystems anyway.
What would people think about changing Dolphin (etc.) to total up the individual file sizes in Properties instead of its current behavior?
