Re: Proposal: gnome-user-share

[Alexander Larsson <alexl redhat com>]

On Thu, 2004-12-02 at 17:20 +0100, Paolo Borelli wrote:
> 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?

What if your original folder name was before the italian translation was
added. Would you still want it in English when you get italian in the
rest of the UI? What if the italian translation changes for some reason?

One can clearly have different opinions on this. I personally think it
makes sense to have any system added/references names be translated like
the rest of the ui.

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

There is a variety of ways we could decide to handle this:
* Refuse to rename (sounds bad)
* Rename on-disk, thus breaking the speciality of the folder
* Rename in side-stored data, keeping track of the new name separately.
  (This can get problematic to track as you move around folders)

To take an example, OSX seems to do the second, except it doesn't let
you rename the desktop folder from the finder.

> > * 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??

Well. A clear result of this design decision is that such folders will
have english names in the terminal. Whether this is good or bad is
debatable, I mentioned that it doesn't have purely negative aspects.

However, the fact that its easy to write shell-scripts (and other
programs) that easily find these folders and don't create duplicated
ones in other languages is one of the core reasons for having the on-
disk filenames in english.

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

* Nobody but gnome will use gconf
* Its quite hard to use gconf from a shell and some other languages
* lots of apps will just assume its ~/Desktop or whatever, and you'll
get duplicated desktop (and others) dirs.
* Translated names won't be updated as translations are added/completed

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
 Alexander Larsson                                            Red Hat, Inc 
                   alexl redhat com    alla lysator liu se 
He's a Nobel prize-winning soccer-playing farmboy who hangs with the wrong 
crowd. She's a mentally unstable green-skinned detective in the witness 
protection program. They fight crime!