Re: Proposal: gnome-user-share

[Federico Mena Quintero <federico ximian com>]

On Mon, 2004-12-06 at 14:14 -0500, Rodney Dawes wrote:
> > > http://www.gnome.org/~dobey/broken-i18n-dirnames.png
> The bigger problem is the "Sht�a" bookmark, "home" in the path list,
> and "dobey" with the home folder icon in the file/folder list.
> 
> "Sht�a" is the Albanian translation for "home". Home is the directory
> above "dobey", and the bookmark is for "/home/dobey". However, just
> looking at that mess, how am I supposed to know what it actually intends
> to do? I don't think we should be adding more potential pain to the
> mess, and claiming that we should fix it one way, and the people that
> want to work with us can integrate/use our toolkit/whatever, when we
> can't even handle this sanely enough here.

But is *that* case a problem?  To get to that state, you had to go to
the Filesystem, then enter the "home" folder.  That folder is just an
artifact of Linux distros, which say "user home directories live
under /home".  Presumably it could be anything else.  If we had a
mechanism to fetch human-readable names rather than physical filenames,
we could make distros translate /home to "The place where user folders
live" or whatever.

Ideally, Nautilus and the GtkFileChooser should be able to display the
same name for your Home shortcut.  Given that Nautilus lets you rename
your Home icon in the desktop, we could do several things:

1. Add gtk_file_system_gimme_home_name(), which would be implemented as
some GConf magic or something under GtkFileSystemGnomeVFS.  This
would suck.

2. Add a general mechanism to map physical filenames to human-readable
names, i.e. what a large part of this thread was about.  This is much
better in the long run.

With (2), both Nautilus and the file chooser would be able to display
the same name for your home folder and for anything else.

  Federico