Special folders in gnome

[Mattias Eriksson <snaggen acc umu se>]

In gnome we currently have a situation where some folders are special,
like Templates, Pictures and Music. Those are user visible folders that
in some case have the folder names hard coded in English.

* Templates need to be called Templates, I think it is nautilus that
requires this. It is not configurable by the user.
* Pictures need to be called this since it is hard coded in
gnome-screensaver. The maintainer refuses to make this configurable by
the user. Other programs like gthumb lets the user select the pictures
folder.
* Music is configurable by the user in all software that uses it. It's
still a special folder since it most likely has a very structured
layout, that is defined in sound-juicer. This layout might be
interesting to more than one program (for example, if rhythmbox would
add a possibility to move music between a removable device in to the
music arcive).

The situation, as I understand it, is that the problem with translating
the folders are not a simple one. So currently the decision is to use
English folder names for these folders, which is not an acceptable
solution. And for you who think it is not a very big problem I suggest
changing the folders names to Swedish for a month, too see how it feels.
Swedish names are: Templates - Mallar, Pictures - Bilder, Music -
Musik. 

I feel that this situation must be solved soon, especially since more
and more program are to rely on these kind of folders (like
gnome-screensaver that uses a hard coded folder to avoid preferences).


I don't have a perfect solution. But one (not totaly sucky) solution
could be a solution where special folders are defined in a gconf-setting
(system/gnome/folders/Pictures are set to the path to the Pictures
folder, or a list of path to allow the user to have multiple music
archives). Folders could then be created with a translated path the
first time they are requested. If this sould be in the wrong locale, so
the user logs out and changes the locale the gconf setting is till set
and the folders will still work. In this case is needs to be possible to
modify the path by the user, this should be possible to add in nautils
folder preferences ("Use this folder as ["Template", "Picures", "Music",
"Just a plain folder"] or something like that.
I feel like the downsides of this, by possibly making things more
complex, are a lot smaller than forcing a foreign language on to the
user (my mother have a very hard time using non-translate applications,
and she wouldn't understand what the Templates folder would be used
for).
Another positive thing is that if the folder is stored in gconf, it
would also be possible to add some folder settings to it (Like music
archive layout).

I know that this have been discussed in the past, but no solution was
reached then. I hope it will be different this time.

//Snaggen