Re: RFC: Common desktop-wide paths

[Samuel Abels <newsgroups debain org>]

On Sat, 2004-10-02 at 03:28, Marc O'Morain wrote:
> Hi there,
> 
> This topic has been covered before, but no conclusion was made.
> http://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2003-January/msg00273.html
> 
> The original proposal was to define a set of folders for storing files
> created by the average desktop PC user. In my case these folders are
> {Documents, Downloads, Photos, Music, Video}. I believe that this common
> folderset would help the end-user to store and mange files more easily,
> and would promote continuity across the desktop.

Am I the only one who does not like the idea?

At work, we don't think in terms of document types. We think in terms of
projects and we want all data types would to be stuffed into the same
directory (Projects/"Projectname"/).
Also, some files are in a shared directory, /pub/. How would you solve a
scenario like that?

At home, I could maybe live with some of the directory names, but
because of the large number of "Documents" I would like to have them
split via multiple directories, so I have "Letters", "Books" and "Other
Documents" visible right on my desktop.

Now, for example, if you download some files from one project from the
Intranet with the web browser, all files would be in different
directories, depending on their media type. Now /that/ would be annoying
(and confusing as well).

Thirdly, "Incoming" files are sometimes badly named (or even have
erroneous content) and I would like to look through them before they are
sorted into a folder together with other files.

So I guess what I am trying to say is that we need a nice and easy way
to make this more flexible, otherwise it is much too general.

One solution already pointed out to solve the I18N issue would be "ln -S
~/Music ~/Desktop/Musica/". But this would

a) move us one step further from using $HOME as desktop.
b) pollute the home directory of users who out of the above reasons do
not use that behaviour.
c) not solve the flexibility issue (Split "Documents" into "Letters",
"Books", etc.).

So I would like to see this if it is implemented using gconf keys
mapping MIME to directory, in combination with well chosen defaults. If
the gconf key does not exist, a default directory ~/Desktop/Downloads or
~/Desktop/Incoming or simply ~/Desktop is used.

That way, you could have the proposed behaviour by default, plus satisfy
the needs of those who want a more (or less/none) specific
categorysation.

-Samuel

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