Re: Proposal: gnome-user-share

[Alan Cox <alan lxorguk ukuu org uk>]

On Iau, 2004-12-02 at 15:47, Alexander Larsson wrote:
> might not be set up, you might have no, or a slow internet connection
> etc. Really, "File sharing" is not the ideal name for this, perhaps it
> should be called "network file transfering".

The modern version of this and thus the interface people are becoming
used to is bluetooth/irda "Send foo to bar" functionality. The more I
think about this the more I'd rather we followed the phone world of
sending things to people. It avoids so much "oh I forgot about.." mess,
it avoids magic directory naming and it becomes a single natural menu
item that matches peoples phone experience. Click file, hit "Send",
select "Dave's computer" hit OK. The user hasn't got to know if it was
sent via bluetooth, irda, internet, uucp or carrier pigeon. The user
hasn't got to remember to unshare it, the user hasn't got to move files
back and forth.

> * 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.)

But that is the right thing to do generally for a multi-lingual user.
They don't want to break stuff. Its a semantic question about whether
you see
"Shared" as something the user created and did stuff with or something
the
desktop inflicts on the user. You are again muddling up questions like
Desktop with sharing which have different sets of programming concerns.

> I'm not especially attached to the folder name "Public". I think that
> is what OSX uses, but if people like another name I'm fine with
> that. "Shared Files" isn't all bad, although given the usecase 1 vs
> usecase 2 discussion above, the term "sharing" might not be ideal given
> what we mean here.

You don't need to have a huge inquest if the path name is settable by
the 
user. Those who don't like it will fix it.