Re: Special folders in gnome

[James Henstridge <james jamesh id au>]

Frederic Crozat wrote:

>>I have tried ~/Pictures/.directory, but it seems not to be interpreted.
>>    
>>
>
>It is a KDE only stuff, which is quite bad in term of performance,
>because, when reading a directory, it forces file manager to try to open
>each directory in that directory and tries to search for .directory in
>it. 
>  
>
IIRC, the Apple solution is a bit of a compromise here:

    * For well known folders like ~/Desktop, a translation is provided
      if the the folder contains a ".localized" file.  This file is
      empty, and doesn't contain the translations.
    * For other folders, they will only show localised names if the
      folder name ends in ".localized".  If the folder's name ends in
      this extension, then a ".localized" subfolder is checked for the
      translations.

This allows the system to quickly determine which folder names need to
be translated in the UI without having to read the directory.  It also
means that a new version of the OS can provide new translations for
things like "Desktop" and have those translations seen by existing
installs (the same isn't true for the custom localised folders).

Some of the details are available here:

http://developer.apple.com/documentation/MacOSX/Conceptual/BPInternational/index.html

(click on "Localizing pathnames" in the sidebar).

James.