Re: Translations of folder names - two proposals

[Alan Cox <alan lxorguk ukuu org uk>]

On Sad, 2004-12-11 at 17:19, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> 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.

The right UI is to have a working implementation that doesn't play
games. I've seen so many "fake unix on DOS" "fake unix on VMS" type
things and they always break in the end. 

>  - 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

Bugzilla.gnome.org is proof that programmers will use any API
incorrectly. This is a strawman.

> 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.

I'm still confused why "use this as my Desktop" requires file system
support. We've managed since the late 1970's with a flat text file
telling programs and users where to put their personal file store. Its
translatable, its configurable and programs handle it well. Its called
"/etc/passwd".