RE: Virtual Directory Structure

[Jorg Rathlev <joerg jrsoftware de>]

> >  [+] My Home   /home/foo
> 
> Duplication? IMHO it should be under /home/ like the rest (just center
> on it when starting). And please remove My, it is relative (your my or
> my my ;] ). I never understood it, maybe it is a culture matter, in my
> languaje you do not normaly say "I", so when people insists with "I,
> me, my", it looks a bit weird; so please do not take it as offense.

Yes, it should be under /home/ as well, but I think it could be shown
as an additional (virtual) top level folder, too. It makes finding
your home directory a little bit faster. The shell uses ~/ as a
similar shortcut.

About the "my" issue, I think it should be shown to the user that the
files belong to him. I don't know if "my" is the best solution, but
it's pretty much standard (not just Windows, also many web pages use
"my").

Not having any "ownership info" can create less understandable
names. For example, the german "my computer" (in Windows) is called
"workplace" (in german, of course). I always thought that's a rather
strange name, until I found out it's called "my computer" in
english. Yes, this is a localization issue, but similar mistakes can
be made in english language as well. BTW, I think "This computer" (for
the english version) would be even better than "My computer", but
English is not my native language, so I might be wrong.

Of course, localization always has to take care of cultural issues.

> Do we leave the first / or remove it? If top entry is / (which it
> should, otherwise you can not view / per se), better leave only the
> ending /.

Ooops. Yes. I forgot about the / directory...

> Dialogs could also show the extra info if the user has the feature
> active. Of course, boxes, URLs and others would look fine with real
> names.

Yes, but it's more difficult to show such info in a complete path like
/mnt/cdrom/setup/ or something. How would you show that? /Removable
Media (mnt)/CD ROM Drive (cdrom)/setup/ ? IMHO that's not much nicer
to read than just the real names, and it gets way too long. And it
gets inconsistent if no additional info is available (like "setup" in
the above example, though you might display that as "Setup (setup)/")
Of course, dialogs that display a (visual) list of folders or
something should display the friendly names.

> Supposing you can write to the dir, you get info, if you can not, you
> never get the translation, so you have not solved anything. Other
> problem is that you start populating the filesystem with small files,
> and for remote disk, you have to fetch them.

Ok, there are some problems with this. The advantage of a
.foldersettings file would be that it could be created by whoever
creates the directory. I.e. if you're working with a third-party CD,
it might still have descriptive names, you don't need to configure it
(but you also can't change it).

On your own hard disk, you can do whatever you like. And if you can't
(you're not root), there's probably a reason why you can't (though
read permissions might indeed be a problem as you could not even show
info when you're in the parent folder). Network access/increased
network traffic might be another problem.


Joerg