Re: Translations of folder names - two proposals

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

On Sun, 2004-12-12 at 11:17 -0500, Dan Winship wrote:
> On Sat, 2004-12-11 at 12:07 -0500, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> > And there's no *fundamental* reason that bash can't be aware of display
> > names - so avoiding the approach on those grounds is really saying "we
> > think the bash maintainers will be too stubborn, so we'll work around
> > them with hacks" - to me if bash isn't easy to use along with the
> > desktop, then that's a bash problem, and maybe they will fix it or not,
> > but it's up to them.
> 
> I think the gettext solution *is* fundamentally incompatible with
> fully-translated command-line usage. Consider "echo Skrivbord" vs "ls
> Skrivbord". Bash can't know which command arguments are supposed to be
> paths and which aren't. You would need to add support to every single
> command-line program (and shell script), which is never going to happen.
> 
> If we are happy saying that command-line usage is out of scope, then
> this isn't a problem, but if you want to claim as part of the proposal
> that command-line usage could be fixed some day, then I'd want to see a
> concrete explanation of exactly how.
> 

I *am* saying shell stuff always loses to GUI-only-user concerns given a
tradeoff, but I also think you could address it in the shell. You could
try display name first and then path, or you could have a special
notation for display names, or we could step back and improve the shell
in more fundamental ways (several people have long sets of ideas on that
apparently, I've never thought about it myself). I'm not going to bother
to flesh it out because fundamentally I don't care; my (not yet
achieved) goal for quite some time has been to stop using the shell -
and it wouldn't hurt for most core GNOME hackers to have the same
goal. ;-) At least for the occasional week of penance and self-
education.

Havoc