Re: Structure in $HOME

[Seth Nickell <snickell stanford edu>]

On Wed, 2003-01-15 at 15:09, Alan Horkan wrote:
> 
> On Wed, 15 Jan 2003, Martin Waitz wrote:
> 
> > and what do you do with non-english speaking users?
> >
> > localizing file names sucks
> 
> What to do?
> 
> You take a long hard look at what Microsoft have done.  ditto Apple (in
> fact look at apple first) KDE and anyone else you care to think of.
> Compare copy and improve, or "embrace and extend if you prefer".

Microsoft releases specifically customised versions of Windows for many
locales. I suspect this is not a good long term option for Linux
desktops, especially if we would like our desktops to work well for even
relatively small "3rd world" language groups.

> Does this really need to be discussed in minute detail on the list?
> What are the localised names for
> /usr /bin /dev ?  (yes i am being facetious).

Yes, and its a great example of exactly why /usr, /bin and /dev are such
shitty names. There's no localisation for them because, to a large
extent, they are "nonsense" words. Even unlocalised English names would
be better than nonsense names, though only marginally so (Proposing that
traditional non-any-language names are a good solution is, imo, being a
dog in the manger).

> With all the talk of URI's why dont we just have
> /data with subdirs /img /doc /web /mp3 /ogg
> and then use some nice URI to hide the complexity?

Because URIs introduce more complexity than they hide. They are not a
good solution for user visible interfaces. If you're proposing them as
an invisible technical solution, I'm not quite sure what the problem
they are addressing is. Without building a complete filename resolution
system into a virtual filesystem layer (accessed like a "URI"), which
essentially means you bypass the "real" filesystem altogether, its
pretty darn hard to localise the filenames.

-Seth