Re: Icons of program

[robert havoc pennington <rhpennin midway uchicago edu>]

(Note to no one in particular: some people seem to be missing that there
are already foo.desktop and .directory files which keep icon information,
among other things. See share/apps and libgnome/gnome-dentry.[hc].) 

What about this idea: it would keep everything nice and simple if these
files and regular files simply weren't allowed to exist in the same
directory. That is, the .desktop files are "shortcuts," and are in their
own directory tree.  Naive users should never even see the real file
system. If they create new files, Gnome will invisibly put the data
somewhere like ~/.gnome-stuff, and create a new .desktop entry.  By
default, it shouldn't even be possible to view the real Unix file system
from gmc, only the tree of .desktop entries. 

This is the only way I can think of to get rid of the complexity of the
Unix file system, without dropping ext2, or using hacks like changing cp. 
And the complexity of the Unix file system *must* go away. People
shouldn't have to worry about /usr, /bin, etc. unless they are sysadmins,
and then they can put gmc in "advanced" mode or use the command line. A
global option can change gmc's mode and the eventual GnomeFileSelection
widget.  But all most people really want to see are executables and their
data files. 

I think BeOS does something to hide the full Unix directory tree, but I
don't remember exactly how it works. Windows is terrible in this respect. 
Its file browsing is incredibly confusing (the solution being the Start
menu), but customizing the Start menu requires finding the correct
.exe in the file system. Also many tasks can't be performed from the start
menu. This is an example of a halfway solution, rather than a clean break
between the GUI system and the real implementation. Gnome should be a
whole new layer, not a more attractive interface to Unix, if it's
genuinely going to be easy to use.

I'm not sure this particular solution would work but something like it has
to happen IMO. The Unix fs with system dirs, symlinks, mount points, . and
.., dotfiles, etc. needs to be hidden.

Havoc Pennington
http://pobox.com/~hp