Re: Special folders in gnome

[Frederic Crozat <fcrozat mandriva com>]

Le vendredi 13 janvier 2006 à 14:14 +0100, Murray Cumming a écrit :
> On Fri, 2006-01-13 at 13:52 +0100, Frederic Crozat wrote:
> > Le vendredi 13 janvier 2006 à 11:37 +0100, Murray Cumming a écrit :
> > > On Fri, 2006-01-13 at 21:29 +1100, Jeff Waugh wrote:
> > > > <quote who="Mattias Eriksson">
> > > > 
> > > > > I know that this have been discussed in the past, but no solution was
> > > > > reached then. I hope it will be different this time.
> > > > 
> > > > I strongly agree that we need a solution for this (something GConf defined
> > > > would be perfect for desktop/network administrators). Let's do it for 2.16?
> > > 
> > > Why do we need to tranlate the on-disk folder name of Templates if we
> > > don't need to translate the folder names of home, bin, and all of the
> > > bash commands? Why isn't it good enough to translate it in the user
> > > interface?
> > 
> > I think it has been explained a long in the previous
> > flamewar^Wdiscussion :)
> > 
> > If you don't use the same name on disk and in the UI, you get incorrect
> > result as soon as people don't use apps which are able to get the name
> > of applications : shell,
> 
> The shell is strange, and always will be, whatever we do.

Problem is not really shell by itself (well, it can be for support /
admin people) but shell scripts..

> >  KDE applications, whatever apps not GNOME
> > related.
> 
> Of course we'd need to standardize this. We already share a standard
> with KDE for $HOME/Desktop/, and I guess that KDE also translate the
> name of Desktop in their UI.

Well, we no longer translate Desktop anymore in the latest version of
GTK File selector.

> But if an application's (non-GTK+, non-Qt) file chooser doesn't
> translate it, the effect is only that a Chinese person sees an English
> folder name. Not the end of the world.

I don't agree with you. I think it is very problematic if we want to be
credible on the desktop outside the english world. It is a matter of
polish or fixing the rough edges. Without this, people will always say
"look, it sucks, blabla". One of the reason of Apple success is IMHO
their sense of the polish.

> But if we encourage translated on-disk folder names then we get multiple
> instances of the same folder when applications hard code the names. This
> is what we experience on Windows, even though the API to avoid this is
> available to all applications.
> 
> It's a lot safer to hope that developers use some API to translate in
> the UI than to hope that developers use some API when installing stuff
> to a path or opening that path.

If the API is done right (ie translation is based on the user running
locale, not the hardcoded translation inside the app), it should be a
problem.

I'm not saying translated on-disk folder are THE solution, but unless we
have a way to have translated folders behaving just like other folders
in all applications, it is not a too bad solution.


> > Since we (Mandriva) have decided to hit the bullet the hard way with our
> > last release (Mandriva Linux 2006), let me share the problems we found
> > by trying to implement such a system (and we are still not 100% happy
> > with it but it can be seen as a prototype :) :
> > After reading extensively the discussions on this subject in the various
> > GNOME ml, we decided the following set of functionnalities we wanted to
> > implement, both in GNOME AND KDE :
> > 
> > -give users predefined directories in their home to store their data :
> > Download, Documents, Music, Pictures and Video (this is newbie
> > oriented).
> > -allow quick access to these directories from the various file selectors
> > (GNOME, KDE)
> > -allow those directories to be distinguished when using file manager
> > (nautilus, konqueror) with a different icon, but handled as standard
> > directories
> > -only display localized names in the UI
> > -be able to access those directories now or in the future using scripts
> > without too much trouble even if they are localized.
> > -if users choose to delete these directories, they should not come back
> > or be displayed in any UI anymore
> > -if possible, applications save/load difectories should be using those
> > directories by default.
> > 
> > So, our initial implementation was doing the following :
> > at first login, create directories with english name on disk in $HOME,
> > also create .desktop file in $HOME, with localized name and pointing to
> > those directories and add those .desktop file to ~/.gtk-bookmarks.
> > 
> > Pro :
> > -no need to patch applications / environment too much to get something
> > working
> > Con :
> > -the english names were always visible, even in non english locale
> 
> Why, if you "only display localized names in the UI"?

Because we couldn't hide those directories : they were created in HOME
directory, using .hidden hack to hide them in nautilus/konqueror would
have added other problem ("why do I see stuff with ls / whatever stuff
might use and I don't see them in nautilus ?") and moreover, removing
translated name would not have removed the untranslated folder.

But as I said, it was our first implementation. We learn the hard way ;)

PS : don't cc me, I'm subscribed to the list.

-- 
Frederic Crozat <fcrozat mandriva com>
Mandriva