Re: Translations of folder names - two proposals

[Kalle Vahlman <kalle vahlman gmail com>]

Just to state my opinion on this madness, you guys are on crack.

You seriously are considering to apply magic glue *twice* to make a
folder look like something it's not. First at shell level as an ugly
hack (it won't be pretty until the filesystem supports it directly)
and then as special cases in the GUI (desktop, home).

Now, in the GUI it makes sense since it is done to achieve special
things, a desktop, templates and so on. But what can be achieved in
the shell for this? That's right, the name is translated. Big deal. As
a bonus, you'll get tons of border cases that break the system
horribly (when in fact the issue solved is the border case).

What should then be done here?

- Define standard and fixed locations for stuff, in plain english. Not
because it's the most beautiful language, but because it's the default
in all computing and most programming languages due to historical
reasons (bad argument, but makes the most sense). This would be cool
to be from FDO, but a GNOME standard would suffice (there's no reason
to be extra friendly to other environments, if standards do not
exist).

- IF needed, translate the name in the GUI (consistently). Note that
in most cases there is no need to expose the actual path to the user,
and as paths are not considered to be a good mental model for users
anyhow, it should be avoided when possible. Take ~/Music (fictional
example) for instance, that can be referenced as "the music folder" or
"musiikkikansio" in the GUI where needed (cd ripper, nautilus,
bookmarks, filechooser, rhythmbox), but there is no need to know where
it actually resides when using the files through the GUI.

I personally think that the GUI should abstract the filesystem
completely from the users view ($HOME is also crap when exposed in the
GUI) and using standard locations to at least semi-automatically save
and retrieve stuff without bothering the user about it would be a
start. It would allow programs to know exactly where to look for files
and then let the user choose them intelligently (for example by a
search) instead of browsing, which is a dumb and tiresome operation.

After all, it's not the users job to locate the files, or at least it
shouldn't be.

-- 
Kalle Vahlman, zuh iki fi