Re: Proposal: gnome-user-share

[Peter Williams <peter newton cx>]

On Tue, 2004-11-30 at 19:51 -0600, Shaun McCance wrote:
> Uh-huh.  User B is in the Pig Latin locale.  User B opens Nautilus and
> sees folders like Esktopday and Ublicpay.  User B opens RandomQtApp,
> which she uses regularly as part of her job.  RandomQtApp shows User B
> folders named Desktop and Public.  Multiple choice:
> 
> A) User B is impressed that certain applications are able to translate
> her folder names dynamically, and wishes the other applications would do
> the same.  She goes so far as to file a bug against RandomQtApp.
> 
> B) User B doesn't even understand that they're the same folders, and
> thinks that "Linux" is broken.
> 
> C) User B goes back to her shiny Mac.

I think we all understand that the inconsistency between the displayed
name the filesystem name is not exactly cool. But neither is having to
do

	if [ -d ~/Desktop ] ; then
		desktopdir=~/Desktop
	elif [ -d ~/Esktopday ] ; then
		desktopdir=~/Esktopday
	...
	cp my-cheesy-program.desktop $desktopdir

Fixing apps to display things correctly seems like a much more tractable
problem than essentially trying to guess the directory name. Users don't
have to guess the name, but applications do, and applications are
stupider than users. The best workaround I can think of is something
like

	~/Esktopday
	~/Emplatestay
	~/.special-folders/Desktop -> ../Esktopday
	~/.special-folders/Templates -> ../Emplatestay

But I doubt that solves anything: no doubt links can break / not exist,
and clueless app authors will still try to copy things to ~/Desktop.

Peter

-- 
Peter Williams                          peter newton cx

"[Ninjas] are cool; and by cool, I mean totally sweet."
                              -- REAL Ultimate Power