Re: Translations of folder names - two proposals

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

On Fri, 2004-12-10 at 16:02 +0000, Alan Cox wrote:
> On Gwe, 2004-12-10 at 09:15, Andy Balaam wrote:
> > Thanks for the excellent summary of what I think are the two best 
> > options, Alexander.
> > 
> > Personally I think the gettext option is best, since its disadvantages 
> > don't seem so serious.
> 
> I would agree they are not serious. I would say they are "show stopper
> level catrastrophically bad" and introduce a raft of insoluble
> consistency problems. In essence the gettext plan is to lie to the user
> and attempt to keep up the lie. 

You're saying "the right UI decision is to expose the implementation
model" and as a categorical guideline that is indefensible (it leads to
horribly designed software). Thus, if we have our priorities straight we
will not accept this guideline.

It could be defended in particular cases, but if we're talking about
file and directory user model in the GUI vs. implementation model:

 - we are not even close to the implementation model in the status quo
   (.directory, .desktop, file chooser, Computer folder, etc.)
 - the user model we want here is clearly better than the 
   implementation model
 - the symlinks hack makes the implementation model even more 
   complicated, and we have empirical evidence that programmers
   and script authors will not understand said model and will 
   use it incorrectly

The global guideline that would be more defensible is "the
implementation model should be made as close as possible to the user
model" (rather than vice versa as you are framing it) but in this case
we can't change how filesystems work, unfortunately. If we could, then
adding a filesystem feature to support this would be ideal.

Havoc