Re: RFC: Common desktop-wide paths

[Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>]

On Mon, 2004-10-04 at 05:03, Mikael Hallendal wrote:
> Alan Cox wrote:
> > On Sad, 2004-10-02 at 02:28, Marc O'Morain wrote:
> > 
> >>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.
> >  
> > Aside from the philosophical debates nobody has solved the
> > internationalisation one even for the desktop folder yet. If I log in in
> > Welsh is the Sain folder the same as the Music folder in English. If
> > not, why not. If it is how are you implementing it.
> 
> Why not just do it as they seem to do in Mac OSX, the actual directory 
> names on disk are in English and then translated in Nautilus only. So if 
> you access your home directory by a powertool such as the terminal you 
> go to ~/Desktop no matter if it's named Skrivbord (Swedish) in Nautilus.
> 
> I think this is a good enough solution since the terminal is a powertool 
> and powerusers can easily learn to map between their locale and the 
> english names for a couple of directories even if they don't know english.

OS X does a lot of stuff along this line.  Like the path to a file in
the Finder isn't necessarily the path to the file on the filesystem.  It
creates a disconnect from the graphical interface and the command line. 
On more than one occasion, I've been completely unable to figure out
where a file *actually* is, and that's annoying.

But that's not a reason not to do this sort of thing.  We should just be
more careful about it, and more courteous to our power users.  Putting
the actual path in the properties dialog would be enough to satisfy me.

--
Shaun