Re: Proposal: gnome-user-share

[Maciej Katafiasz <ml mathrick org>]

Dnia 02-12-2004, czw o godzinie 12:41 +1100, Jeff Waugh napisał:
> > > I think automatically sharing ~/Public/ is a great idea.  (The Mac does
> > > this, too.)  It's not the end-all-be-all of file sharing systems, but
> > > it's incredibly helpful for a quick "hey Bob, Alice needs to see this
> > > file".
> > 
> > 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?
> 
> Sit down and ask your Mum or a secretary some time if they understand the
> Windows file sharing model (in layman's terms), and then ask if they know
> which folders they've shared alrady. Bonus points if you show them how to
> share things one week, and ask them what's shared the next week.

Well, give me one reason that prevents us from fixing that flaw? If we
face problems, we should be fixing them, not putting some gross hacks
and sticking with model that's inherently less capable. Hardcoded
~/Public is going to suck in two major use-cases: small/medium-scale
inter-company sharing ("Ann works on annual reports, but her entire
section needs to access them"), and neighbourhood-type sharing of movies
and music ("Tom wants to share his 10GB music collection with Tim next
door"). So, unless you consider sharing silly flash files and random
pictures the only use-case worthy of supporting, ~/Public[1] is
hopelessly limited, and in the end, user-unfriendly.

Cheers,
Maciej

[1] I mean, ~/Public and *only* ~/Public. There's nothing wrong with
having shared ~/Public for those silly files for default, and also
there's nothing that prevents us from shipping shared ~/Public in
"Windows-type" model. That's very good idea, similar to ~/Documents.