Re: Proposal: gnome-user-share

[Ken Harris <ken bitpoetry com>]

On Wed, 2004-12-01 at 20:35 -0500, Brian Skahan wrote:
> How is this an improvement over me clicking on the folder where the
> file allready resides and hitting "Share", rather than
> copy/move/linking to ~/Public?

They do different things, for one.  Assuming, of course, that the folder
has more than one file (most folders do).

I *could* make a new folder, rename it to something (the same name as my
file?), copy the file to there, right-click the new folder, and enable
sharing there.  But that seems like more work than "Places -> Shared,
copy file to window that appears".

So that's one reason: if you don't have ~/Public/ provided, it's harder
to share just one file than it is to share a folder, even if you
understand the Windows file-sharing model (which Jeff says is
non-trivial -- *shrug* I haven't used it in a while).

Also, if you have ~/Public/Drop Box/, there's an easy, standard place
for other people to give you stuff.  I know people who, if they saw
this, would say "a-ha! that's neat, I can use that", but if a drop-box
wasn't provided, they wouldn't realize that they could set up such a
folder, much less figure it out themselves.


(Note, I'm not saying that you shouldn't also be allowed to share other
folders.  I haven't actually made up my mind on that yet.  But even if
you do, making this automatic will help out lots of people who don't
want to muck around with per-folder sharing options.)


I guess the main point of my message was that once you share a file, it
should stay shared until you un-share it -- stability is important.
Making it as simple as my Mac would be nice, too, but I probably won't
tear my hair out if it isn't.  :-)


- Ken