Re: [Usability] Languages and Directories

[Alan Horkan <horkana maths tcd ie>]

On Tue, 17 Apr 2007, Thilo Pfennig wrote:

> Date: Tue, 17 Apr 2007 15:29:19 +0200
> From: Thilo Pfennig <thilopfennig foresightlinux org>
> To: Usability gnome org, gnome-i18n gnome org
> Subject: [Usability] Languages and Directories
>
> I am not sure which this is the right list so I wrote to usability and i18n.

This kind of thing has also been discussed on desktop devel every time
default folder such as Documents, Pictures, Music, etc get brought up.

> I think we have an issue with application defaults directories.

/home
/media

these issue are at a much lower level than Gnome, this is largely a
filesystem issue.

while some things can be done such as the way the Desktop folder and home
directory are usually presented to users in an interenationalisation
friendly way there are many people with various requirements which go way
beyond the reasonable scope of Gnome.

> Some applications always use english directory names.

If you could give specific examples perhaps we on the usubility list can
find some cases where the application could do a better job and abstract
out the direct file manipulation but there will be many cases of
"hysterical raisins" and certain less than perfect internationalisation
will need to tolerated because of way the many layers underneath Gnome
have built up.

> Any thoughts on this?

The standard Music folder question is a whole other can of worms.  If I
have time later I'll try to dig up some of the threads from Desktop devel
where the discussion went through many cycles.


Sincerely

Alan Horkan

* histerical raisins = historical reasons