Re: templates patch ...

[Michael Meeks <michael meeks novell com>]

Hi David,

On Mon, 2008-06-30 at 10:42 -0400, David Zeuthen wrote:
> I'm worried that people end up with menus like these

	Sure - but empirically this has not proved to be the case in KDE - so
we can relax ;-)

>  Create Document -> OpenOffice Writer ODF document
>                     Abiword ODF document
>                     KOffice ODF document

	Presumably all of them creating the same blank ODF document ;-) which
sounds pretty lame.

> So I don't think this feature you're suggesting is going to help anyone,
> see e.g. how bad this works on Windows. This is why I'm opposed to the
> feature.

	So - how can an administrator create default templates in these places
for all users of all systems they administer ? And - as a better
question: what default templates should a general purpose desktop come
with ? what document types are sufficiently generally useful to make
them easy to create anywhere.

> One can also argue that it's still not discoverable how to launch the
> word processor.

	It's not the launching of a word processer that is a problem - but
using nautilus to create a word processing document: in a given place
(ie. where the user might have a chance of finding it again when they
browse to the same place ;-).

> Back to the problem at hand, you want to make it easy for your father to
> create OpenOffice documents. Typically when people use a full fledged
> word processor they create documents of a given type. Hence why we have
> the Templates feature. Does OpenOffice save templates to ~/Templates?

	What templates ? the system installed templates ? no - they are per
system, not per-user; or do you mean the templates the user chose once ?
if so - no, or do you mean the templates they authored ? [ that is done
by a tiny sub-set of people ].

>  If so, is this feature implemented in a way that compel users to use it? If
> not, is this something that the OpenOffice team is interested in working
> on?

	Sure - making OO.o's (huge) template set available via the right-click
menu sounds like a disaster ;-) much better to have a single .desktop
file that is launched: "Create new Office document" with a right click
on a given directory that having been passed the right path will create
a new document in there & launch OO.o on it. Browsing thousands of
templates in a context menu is not a good approach: so then we're left
with some evil UI feature such as a check-box:

	"[ ] add to the right-click context menu in the file-manager"

	that can be selected in OO.o ? ;-)

	But - really, my question is: why do the defaults suck here ? and what
can we do about it; my patch improves that I think. If you don't like
the defaults, you can hassle the packagers of your operating system to
improve things. And yes - any sane distribution will by default (cf. KDE
ad nauesum) not shove endless junk into your templates menu.

> Another avenue to investigate is extending xdg-user-dirs so it can
> create more than just directories; e.g. it could create and manage
> payloads in ~/Templates just like it does with directories. I think
> that's a more compelling feature as it allows users to manage these
> instead of leaving the user with a lot of useless items in the "Create
> Document" menu. 

	So - wrt. the plurality of file-types idea; at least I buy the argument
that it's slightly sucky to have "Excel spreadsheet" and "ODF
spreadsheet" in the same context menu: would having a special
desktop-file that could launch a more generic "create document" type
help allay your paranoia^H^W fears ;-) about the grey-goo effect of this
menu ? ;-)

> In other words, what I'm trying to say with the last two paragraphs, I
> think it would be useful to try and work with the Templates system
> instead of brutally bypassing it. Of course, I'm not a Nautilus
> maintainer but I thought I'd post my opinion anyway.

	My problem is, perhaps that I don't understand the existing Templates
system you refer to. Here is my use case:

	* hot plug USB device
	* nautilus window pops up showing nice blank space
	* [ I want to create a new document in here ]

	My thesis is a right-click Templates menu should be -useful- at least
on a new, blank install of a new user: and that (in general) the
defaults should be good enough to do something useful out of the box.
They are under KDE ;-)

	HTH,

		Michael.

-- 
 michael meeks novell com  <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot