Re: Translations of folder names - two proposals

[Damon Chaplin <damon karuna uklinux net>]

On Fri, 2004-12-10 at 14:30, Alexander Larsson wrote:
> On Fri, 2004-12-10 at 13:57 +0000, Damon Chaplin wrote:

> > I don't know. I'm not sure we even need the symlinks if we provide a C
> > API and utility apps. We just need an FDO standard for storing the
> > pathnames somewhere.
> 
> But why would you want to store the mapping in a way that makes it much
> harder to use from scripts and suchlike (needing to be in c, or
> requiring gnome-specific apps), when there is a way to store it that
> makes it very easy to use from any unix language (symlinks).
>
> If the directory/symlink doesn't exist its likely that the user didn't
> want that directory, so perhaps we shouldn't create it. This only works
> if we create all such directories on the first login of course.

I'm not sure it is wise to do stuff like this in a script anyway:

  "cp file ~/.folder/Templates"

For that to be OK we'd need to guarantee that all the special folders
always exist (i.e. the user is not allowed to delete them).

To work robustly the script would need to check if the folder existed,
create it if it wanted to (recursively?), and then copy the file into
it. The utility app would simplify this, e.g.

  cp file `gnome-create-standard-folder Templates`


If it is an FDO standard apps wouldn't be required to use GNOME stuff.
They could read the files themselves if they really wanted to.


I am a bit concerned though about how updates to the directory settings
would propagate up to apps. e.g. if the settings were changed in KDE or
even a 3rd-party app while GNOME apps were running, we'd need to make
sure all apps knew about it.

Damon