Re: [Nautilus-list] re: Desktop folder (again)

[Ben Ford <ben kalifornia com>]

David Moles wrote:

>On Sat, 2002-03-30 at 02:14, Ben Ford wrote:
>
>>But you think that it is perfectly reasonable to instruct me to save my
>>Finances.gnucash file (or any other document that I keep in $HOME) in an
>>arbitrary subdirectory which is "buried in a hard to find place", IE, I
>>can't just type 'cd' to get to it?
>>
>
>If Gnucash is far and away the worst culprit for cluttering up your
>desktop, then yes, I do. Why are you manipulating Finances.gnucash from
>the shell in the first place? Is there anything useful you can do with
>it? I would assume that most of the time you just launch Gnucash and
>it opens your last saved document by default.
>

Who said I manipulated Finances.gnucash from the shell?  As I stated, I
simply saved the file in the default location.  And again, as stated
before, the average user would do the same, and in your $HOME == Desktop
scenario, be quite flustered at the 50+ files that for some unknown
reason accumulate on the desktop.

But even so, there are scads of reasons to manipulate the file from the
shell.  Perhaps I'd like to include it in a daily scripted backup.
 Perhaps I'd like to copy it and experiment on the copy.  Perhaps I'd
like to mail it using Pine or Mutt.  I am sure you get the picture.

>What I don't understand is why you think an inconsistency between ease
>of access from the shell and ease of access from the GUI is a good
>thing.
>

Why is it inconsistant?  From the shell if you want to get to the
desktop you type "cd ~/Desktop", from the gui if you want to get to
$HOME you click on "$USER's Home Directory".  It is just like your
office*  is not your desk** and your desk is not your office.

*   Your $HOME room inside your company, where you keep all your stuff,
including your desk where much of your work takes place.
** Your $Desktop, where much of your work takes place, but not where you
keep every damn thing in your office.


>>If ~/Desktop is unacceptable to you, what makes you think that
>>~/Documents would be acceptable to me?
>>
>
>The fact that I've tried both and found out that this way works better
>for me. And I was initially resistant to the idea as well. Try it for
>a while with an open mind and then come back.
>

So, because it works for you, it *has* to work for me.  This is a matter
of preference here.  The whole idea behind Open Source / Free Software /
Whatever-you-want-to-call-it is freedom of choice.  I (and many many
others) completely abandoned the wares of a certain company because they
imposed their ideas on me.  Don't think that I (and many many others)
won't do it again.

>>And another thing that I have noticed here a lot.  Calling something a
>>legacy app doesn't make it go away and it in no way makes what you are
>>creating superior to it.  People have been doing things a certain way
>>since long before many of us were even born.  What makes you think they
>>are all going to obligingly change their ways of working because you
>>decide on it?
>>
>
>Actually, the GNOME project has done a pretty decent job of either
>getting legacy applications to change their behavior or replacing
>them with new, well-behaved applications, so far. If we're just
>going to say "The UNIX Way is for applications to be inconsistent
>and sucky", we might as well all give up and go home.
>

Well-behaved?  By your standards maybe.  But what you are trying to do
is impose *your* ideas on the entire community.  Personally I would
prefer to have every single dotfile in my $HOME be a non-hidden file in
one ~/.etc/ directory.  Does that entitle me to call all your
application "misbehaving"?

You know, you guys sound just like Be did a few years ago.


-b

--
So, make a real effort to avoid getting sucked into all the expensive
lifestyle habits of typical Americans.  Because if you do that, then
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