Re: Major change in desktop handling

[Peter Harvey <pah06 uow edu au>]

On Sat, 2003-05-17 at 01:55, George Farris wrote:
> Could an explanation be given why a GConf key wouldn't work, after all
> just because we can't foresee a very necessary reason to change the
> desktop, doesn't mean it won't appear.
> 
> -- 
> George Farris <george gmsys com>

One problem I can see with a simple GConf key (and something I mentioned
in another fork of this discussion) is that programs are going to
require additional programming to handle the case with home-as-desktop.

For example, if a user has home-as-desktop then file requesters should
have a single button representing Home/Desktop. What should this button
be called? "Home" to keep it consistent with UNIX, or "Desktop" to keep
it consistent with GUI applications.

I'm not an active programmer for anything on Gnome (yet :), so I can't
offer more reasons than that. I can't see any really technical reasons
for it being a problem.

I would suggest that a function be added to some core GNOME lib to fetch
the path of the desktop directory  from GConf, or return null in the
case where home is desktop. This would give a simple way for
applications to decide whether to show special access functions for the
desktop or not. Still, most of this is a question for the usability guys
I think.

-- 
Peter Harvey <pah06 uow edu au>
SITACS, University of Wollongong