Re: Proposal: gnome-user-share

[Paolo Borelli <pborelli katamail com>]

Il giorno gio, 02-12-2004 alle 16:47 +0100, Alexander Larsson ha
scritto:
> * The on-disk filename is static. This means that if you later switch
>   locale, if the locale translation was changed, or if the translation
>   to your language is added later, then the filename will be the old
>   translation. (Or you could rename them on login, but that would break
>   stored pathnames.)
> * If the translation or locale ever changes we can't just use the
>   current translation of the original filename to find the folder,
>   instead we need some sort of lookaside storage that saves the
>   current folder name used for each name. (Of course, such storage
>   would be required in the on-disk-filenames untranslated case too,
>   this is just to point out that we don't get rid of complexity.)
> * The filename encoding might be different in different locales. This
>   means you might not even be able to read the old filename when you
>   switch to another locale. In fact, for some (admittedly weird)
>   setups you might not be able to encode the current translation of
>   the filename to the filesystem encoding.

I do not see these three as arguments in favour of having the on-disk
file name not localised. In fact I would find way more confusing to
switch locale and see some of my directory change name without me
renaming them.
If I am in locale .it and create a normal folder named "Lavoro" and then
switch to .us that dir will continue to be called "Lavoro", it will not
automatically be renamed "Work". Why some of the other folder should
instead exhibit that magical behavior?

Incidentally this also made me think aof the following secondary
problem: what happens when you try to rename the translated-in-the-ui
folder?

> * If we use on-disk translated folder names its very complicated for
>   an application to find a specific folder. Many apps won't do this,
>   especially the sort of quick-hack shellscripts that the unix
>   community loves. This means almost everyone will eventually end up
>   with an english version of the folder and a translated one. Any
>   non-english users of windows will have seen this happen many times
>   before. 


Sorry but I do not buy this: first we say that we don't care about the
terminal and then we argument by saying that the design decisions make
shell scripts easy??

Anyway the solution to this is have a way to easily retrieve which is
the shared directory, for instance by having it in gconf.


paolo