Re: Proposal: gnome-user-share

[Alexander Larsson <alexl redhat com>]

On Thu, 2004-12-02 at 17:43 +0000, Alan Cox wrote:
> 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.

Yeah, this is quite a nice model too. In some ways its better, you can
limit who gets the file, and you don't have to manage the lifetime of
the share. It has some limitations too, you have to know the target
person of the file transfer. It e.g. doesn't work for the speaker on a
conference to say "you can snag the example code from my public files".
Not a huge problem in most cases though.

> > * 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.

We have a couple of these directories like Desktop, Templates, Public,
Download and there are long standing proposals to add more standard
locations like Photos, Music, Documents or whatever. All these have the
same i18n issue. It makes no sense at all to me to solve the i18n issue
for these in different ways.

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 Alexander Larsson                                            Red Hat, Inc 
                   alexl redhat com    alla lysator liu se 
He's an immortal day-dreaming firefighter searching for his wife's true 
killer. She's a wealthy mutant stripper with the soul of a mighty warrior. 
They fight crime!