Re: Special folders in gnome

[Murray Cumming <murrayc murrayc com>]

On Fri, 2006-01-13 at 13:16 -0600, Shaun McCance wrote:
[snip]
> Lots of people *do* have "foreign" applications on their system.
> I know we all like to talk about dear old Aunt Tilly, but one of
> the places we've made inroads is the old UNIX workstation market.
> In those markets, the third-party software is the computer.  It's
> not just some extra application, it's the whole reason you've
> even logged in to the computer.

And those systems generally expose a lot of the internal file-structure,
that is already littered with English or English-like names.

> Having a different name isn't like having a different color or
> a different icon.  We could live with color or icon differences.
> But the name is the single distinguishing characteristic of the
> folder.
> 
> Say my file manager shows me "Bilder" and my expensive vertical
> application shows me "Pictures".  Am I going to shrug my shoulders
> and say "Oh, expensive vertical application didn't translate that
> folder name."?  I doubt it.  Even if I speak both languages, I'd
> assume they're different folders, and I'd be very confused as to
> why different folders disappear in different applications.

Yes, I agree this would be confusing.

> This *will* happen.  Your argument against Matthias's suggestion
> was that applications *might* put things into Pictures instead
> of $PICTURES.  Even if we turn that "might" into a "will", all
> that happens is that some files are in weird different places.
> But all of those weird different places are visible, always, in
> all applications.  No funny disappearing folders.

This is quite a compelling argument, I admit.

-- 
Murray Cumming
murrayc murrayc com
www.murrayc.com
www.openismus.com