Re: Proposal: gnome-user-share

[Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>]

On Tue, 2004-11-30 at 19:04 -0500, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> On Tue, 2004-11-30 at 18:41 -0500, Rodney Dawes wrote:
> > 
> > Agreed. Simply because it's historically done this way, doesn't make it
> > correct or optimal. It just makes it easy. If I open a terminal,
> > shouldn't the folder names be the same, when I run "ls"? It seems odd to
> > have something in cyrillic in the UI, and then go to the terminal, and
> > see "Public". Then again, having it just automatically be translated,
> > will also break, since then you will end up with multiple copies of the
> > same folder, when you switch locales.
> 
> Guys, we can't design around the terminal. Remember that we don't even
> have filesystem paths in the UI. The terminal is another planet. A goal
> of GNOME should be "you don't have to use the terminal for anything" and
> the target audience of GNOME should be people who certainly don't want
> to.

I don't know what "design around the terminal" means.  Does it mean
"consistency with the command line is the final arbiter of every
decision we make" or does it mean "consistency with the command line
should be one factor in our decisions"?  If the former, then yeah, I
totally agree.  If the latter, then you're nuts.

We do not have a complete PC/workstation/whatever solution.  Gnome will
probably never provide that solution.  No distro I know of provides that
solution yet.  The harder you make life for sysadmins, the less likely
you are to get large-scale workstation deployments.

But hey, screw the terminal.  Here's the more relevant point:  The
number of apps written for Gnome is staggeringly low.  Something like
this just totally screws third-party apps.  Speaking as somebody who
gets his paycheck from a largeish ISV (but not speaking on behalf of
said ISV, blah blah blah), I'm pretty sure that SomeRandomApp isn't
going to jump through hoops to show these weird magical names.

Clearly, we need to do something.  But let's not fall into the trap of
"we need something, this is something, we need this".  We need a smart
solution that ISVs will use, and it needs to go through freedesktop.org.

--
Shaun