Re: Proposal: gnome-user-share

[Kai Willadsen <kaiw itee uq edu au>]

On Tue, 2004-11-30 at 18:46 -0500, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> On Wed, 2004-12-01 at 09:20 +1000, Kai Willadsen wrote:
> > 
> > When the first great '$HOME as desktop' flamewar ended, the point that
> > seemed to decide the issue in favour of ~/Desktop was the fact that
> > there were many 3rd-party apps that (ab)used $HOME to store their own
> > data in a user-visible fashion [1].
> > 
> 
> Yes, but ~/Public *is* user documents and data just as ~/Desktop is.

Point taken.

> The
> user can freely delete ~/Public if they don't want to put anything in
> it. It's not like ~/Evolution where you had to have that if you wanted
> to use Evolution.

You could delete ~/Public, but then you just have a serious
discoverability issue, given that you've hard-coded the directory that
they have to use, and you don't expose the capability anywhere else in
the interface.

How does a user know that this directory is used to share files? If they
decide that they don't want to share files now and delete the directory,
and then decide at some point in the future that they do, how will they
work out how to do it under this system? And you can be sure that users
*will* randomly delete directories that they don't understand and that
contain no files.

> $HOME should not be used for "implementation detail" files, with the
> exception of dotfiles. Only user-should-care files. But ~/Public should
> contain user-should-care files, so it makes sense in a $HOME non-
> dotfile.

How is the fact that files can only be shared from the ~/Public
directory *not* an implementation detail? That's like saying that the
fact that xchat (used to, iirc) download to ~/dcc is fine, because the
user cares about the contents of ~/dcc.

-- 
Kai Willadsen