Some operations are convenient to talk about, but are impossible or impractical for digital files:
move: digital bitstreams can never be 'moved' between storage locations, they are always copied and then deleted. (They can be 'moved' when changing locations within some media file systems, but in this case the actual bytes don't move. Rather, a pointer to those bytes us updated.)transform: digital bitstreams can be modified in-place within a writable file system, but in practice it is extremely rare to do so in digital preservation workflows. It is difficult to code and the immediate, untraceable loss of the original item is not usually desirable in archival systems. (It make sense for 'hot' systems e.g. databases, but this demands a large array of complex mitigations against data loss.)
However, these operations can be useful from a communications point of view. So rather than simply removing support for them, it's perhaps better to log warnings if they are used and make them display to the user?
Some operations are convenient to talk about, but are impossible or impractical for digital files:
move: digital bitstreams can never be 'moved' between storage locations, they are always copied and then deleted. (They can be 'moved' when changing locations within some media file systems, but in this case the actual bytes don't move. Rather, a pointer to those bytes us updated.)transform: digital bitstreams can be modified in-place within a writable file system, but in practice it is extremely rare to do so in digital preservation workflows. It is difficult to code and the immediate, untraceable loss of the original item is not usually desirable in archival systems. (It make sense for 'hot' systems e.g. databases, but this demands a large array of complex mitigations against data loss.)However, these operations can be useful from a communications point of view. So rather than simply removing support for them, it's perhaps better to log warnings if they are used and make them display to the user?