Re: Filesystem helper, draft 1

[Seth Nickell <snickell stanford edu>]

> OK, lets start joining all in a way we can present to Nautilus people,
> my notes go with [- -]. ;]

Nautilus person present and accounted for... :-)
 
> _- Filesystem helper -_
> 
> o Problem:
> 
> User, specially new ones, get confused with Unix dir names.

This seems like a potential problem. I don't know how often people
wander outside their home folder. Because most of these directories do
not (yet) contain user accessible information, its not clear how
important it is to provide navigability to folders not inside their home
folder. (note: "folder" is the adopted Nautilus convention, not
"directory"). That said, this does seem like a desirable feature in the
long run, particularly as we start adding Nautilus views for special
directories like, say, /proc or /dev.
 
> o Proposed solution:
<snip>
>     [-] home/ - User homes
>        [+] barfoo/ - Bar Foo [- aka Full name -]
>        [-] foobar/ - Foo Bar
>           [+] desktop/ - On screen files [- Uum, complex description -]
>     [+] tmp/ - Temporal storage
Storage in time? ;-)

So do you propose these act as real folder names, or just descriptions?
e.g. can I navigate to /User Homes/Foo Bar's Home/Desktop ? Or is that
merely descriptive text displayed in a column by the file manager?

> o Reasoning:

> something forces them to go outside of it, and that will happen sooner
> or later. Better get real the thing right since day one.

It remains to be seen if MacOS/X's "information hiding" will result in
the same confusion as Windows' convention. That said, this seems like a
reasonable approach, at least initially. Its certainely less invasive.0
 
> Desktop should appear as a real dir (~/desktop/ or just ~/), so users
> view it and can handle it like any other dir. Virtual solutions
> confuse people. [- Coders had a thread about this, and I dunno how it
> ended, I would vote for ~/desktop/ cos you do not have to put every
> book you have at home over the table, only required ones, and you can
> have "wires" or notes to others (symlinks) -]

Don't become too involved with your analogies lest they bind thine hands
and feet. I suspect we will move to ~/Desktop as the defacto desktop
location for GNOME2, and will provide ~/ as an option to advanced users.

-Seth