Re: A Few Standard Folders [Re: Structure in $HOME]

[Christian Meyer <chrisime gnome org>]

Hi Seth!

I wouldn't translate those URIs at all. Apple does that with normal Folders and
when you try to changedir in the Terminal you're lost, because all those
Folders are in English.
It took me some time to get aware of that. IMHO Apple did a very bad job there.

Greetings,
Christian

On 13 Jan 2003 16:49:32 -0800
Seth Nickell <snickell stanford edu> wrote:

> On Mon, 2003-01-13 at 15:09, ERDI Gergo wrote:
> > On Mon, 13 Jan 2003, John McCutchan wrote:
> > 
> > > Also, consistency with non-gnome apps would terrible, if nautilus
> > > calls "~/Video Games" "~/Video Juego"s and the user loads up a 
> > > terminal or a non-gnome app they won't know what "~/Video Games" is.
> > 
> > I don't understand the whole issue here. I18n applies to cases where the
> > actual l10n is meaningful -- i.e. for system-wide stuff. Now, tell me what
> > kind of (schizophrenic, perhaps?) person would want to have a
> > locale-dependant _home directory_? If you are, say, Hungarian, you just
> > create a 'Videók' directory in your $HOME (or have it created for
> > you by some kind of 'Welcome to GNOME' script), and update GConf to
> > register that your video files go to ~/Videók instead of ~/Videos.
> 
> So I want to preface this by saying that I'm not trying to suggest
> solutions, I'm trying to brainstorm.
> 
> Localisation is relevant any time we are including text in our software
> that is presented to the user. If we include some knowledge of standard
> folders in a GNOME install, and consequently textual folder names,
> localisation becomes relevant. The ideal to reach for is to work exactly
> how the computer would work if the software was developed specifically
> for that particular language. 
> 
> If I were developing a Hungarian desktop environment, and I wanted to
> save movies to a default location (Documents would be better, but sadly,
> I don't know Hungarian ;-), I would use ~/Videók. Therefore, in an ideal
> localisation of Hungarian, when I log into my system the default
> location for saving movies should be ~/Videók. I should not have to go
> set a bunch of GConf keys...I've already said that I want my language to
> be Hungarian and it should be.
> 
> So clearly there are some complicating factors that make things
> non-ideal. The most interesting to me reflect not technical hurdles (of
> which there are many, particularly with the filesystem) but fundamental
> design questions. 
> 
> How do we handle user's who like to login using both English and
> Hungarian? Will it be confusing to them if there's a "~/Video" folder
> when they're logged in in English, but "~/Videók" when they log in with
> Hungarian? (I suspect most programmer's gut reaction is "yes", because
> we elevate filesystem stuff as being somehow special, in our control,
> etc, but I think the answer for the person you meet on the street is
> "no").
> 
> Do we have a communication problem if we localise, e.g., theme names?
> Lets say person A's primary language is Hungarian, but they also speak
> some English. They use their computer in Hungarian, but they want to
> discuss the pros and cons of themes on IRC...in English. But how will
> they be able to express the themes they are describing since the names
> they know are in Hungarian?
> 
> etc etc
> 
> Anyway, I would caution people to avoid putting the filesystem on a
> pedestal when you're thinking about issues like localisation. Text in
> folder names on the filesystem is not so very different from, say, text
> in the category names on the Applications menu (if you want to get
> technical, they're actually the same since the Applications menu is just
> read off an applications:/// URI ;-)
> 
> -Seth
> 
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