Re: Translations of folder names - two proposals

[Ryan McDougall <NQG24419 nifty com>]

For some top posting action, I just want to note that I'm not enamoured
of any solution I've heard here, but I fear translating in the GUI is
simply more magic than needed and will cause consistency problems that
we have yet to foresee. I think leaving the directory as the translated
version will be simpler, in the same way that Spatialus is simpler --
there's no mental overhead for the programmer or user.

On Sun, 2004-12-12 at 16:42 +0100, Alexander Larsson wrote:
> On Sun, 2004-12-12 at 11:26 +0000, Alan Cox wrote:
> > Ok to try and solidify this here is a proposal for how we move ahead
> > which avoids the concerns about gconf and magic symlinks but uses the
> > environment. At the same time it allows us to change the rules later.
> 
> There are some problems with environment variables though.
> 
> * They have to be set somewhere. This is would mean gnome-session for
> gnome. If you don't use that (say you run a gnome app under some other
> desktop or a plain wm) then things will break because the env vars don't
> exist.

Not a problem *if* its a FDO standard. They could be set at login and
each desktop would share the values.

> * You can't change environment variables in already running processes,
> so the whole "make this my templates directory" ui would force you to
> log out to enable the change.

True, but the UI would only be there to allow you to fix something you
broke by moving ~/Desktop to ~/机, so I don't think a relogin is asking
too much.

I know, it sounds brittle to me too, but I honestly still prefer it your
proposed magic. At least its easy to say "do X if you move your
desktop".

> * Something similar happens if an app gets a special directory that
> doesn't exist and is forced to create it. Now it can't propagate the new
> env var to other processes. This is ok as long as all apps will create
> the same directory name, but that might not be true if there are other
> implementations than gnome of the fdo standard (which only defined then
> env vars, not the default translations).

In my mind the standard would force all desktops to use the same env
vars.

> * The values of the env vars has to be stored somewhere so that gnome-
> session can set them on login. How this is done isn't defined, which
> means it'll be stored in different places for each desktop. So, if you
> log in to another desktop you'll get a different set of special
> directories.

If its a proper standard, we can set them in one place, no?
> 
> I don't understand in what way this would be better than the symlink
> method.
> 
> Plus, it has the disadvantages of the symlink method I listed in my
> first mail. 
> 

Has anyone here heard a solution they truly like? ;)

Cheers,
Ryan