Zoph trash folder needs to be configured by FreedomBox

You are running Debian GNU/Linux 12 (bookworm) and FreedomBox version 24.24. FreedomBox is up to date.

Zoph configuration has an option to create a trash folder which is not configured by FreedomBox at install time. I'll make the case that this should be configured by FreedomBox automatically, and here is why...

Zoph does not delete imported pictures by design. When a user imports a picture into Zoph and decides they do not like the picture they may delete the picture using the Zoph UI. Zoph will remove any reference to that picture in its database and then ignore the picture file which will remain in /var/lib/zoph. This will put upward pressure on storage consumption that a user won't easily understand. The user would need to find all the files in the zoph folder which are not referred to by the application before deleting these. That exercise is too challenging for the target FreedomBox user.

Zoph can move pictures deleted in the Zoph UI to a trash folder. Defining the trash folder simplifies the storage problem for the user by moving a picture deleted from Zoph from /var/lib/zoph to /var/lib/zoph/trash. This makes it much easier for the user to reclaim storage space by deleting the contents of /var/lib/zoph/trash. Still, this would require the FreedomBox user to log in to a terminal and run rm as root using filename globs and possibly recursion which is risky and contrary to the goals for FreedomBox.

Proposed Solution

Configure Zoph trash folder

The Zoph folder is /var/lib/zoph. Setting the trash configurable to trash will create /var/lib/zoph/trash to contain pictures deleted by the Zoph UI.

Create an "Empty Zoph Trash" function in FreedomBox

The Zoph app management page could have a button to "Empty Zoph Trash" which would be active for FreedomBox administrative users. When clicked this button would effect an rm -rf /var/lib/zoph/trash/* or similar command with sufficient privilege to delete the disk files for the pictures which were deleted in the Zoph UI. Alternately a cron job or similar element to empty the trash automatically on a schedule (say 30 days) could remove the Zoph trash files with mtime > 30 days. Something like find /var/lib/zoph/trash -type f -mtime +30 -exec rm {}