Re: Proposal: gnome-user-share

[Paolo Borelli <pborelli katamail com>]

Il giorno ven, 03-12-2004 alle 05:17 +0100, DmD (Spider) Ljungmark ha
scritto:
> > 
> > I said gconf because it's the first thing that came to my mind, it may
> > well be a plain text file stored in a know location or whatever.
> > What I mean is that a script/application will not have ~/Public
> > hardcoded but will lookup the public folder name in a file, possibly
> > behind a nice get_public_folder api.
> 
> Lets take a lesson here. 
> Microsoft tried this with c:\"Program Files"  Which, on-disk is
> different depending on which translation of windows you are using. 
> 
> They publicly announce with good documentation and a lot of API that you
> are supposed to use the variable %programdir% (or some such)  And are
> -not- supposed to use "C:\Program Files" as your hardcoded path.

> Did this work?  no.  Application designers didn't care, hardcoded
> strings and generally breaks things whenever they get the slightest
> chance, causing a wild mix of "C:\Program" "C:\Programfiler" "C:\Program
> Files" and other, more interesting, versions of the same.
> 

I do not think that Public is very similar to Program Files: 
- programs (at least in most cases) do not have to *add* files to Public
- the folders are in ~ so the user will quickly see the bug and report
it, while Program Files is buried were a lot of people will never look 
- the installed program which installs in "Prografiler" works fine
anyway so people do not even notice the bug, while looking in the wrong
Public folder will make the program not work, which is a good incentive
for the developer to fix it.


paolo