RE: Volume handling proposal

["David Adam Bordoley" <bordoley msu edu>]

Once again replying to a few different emails in one, because i get my 
mailing list emails in digest form. Hope no one minds :) 

> From: Paolo Borelli <pborelli katamail com> 
>
> I know. That's obviously also what I do now: ~/downloads, ~/projects,
> etc... 
>
> The point is that AFAICS Dave is proposing to default at saving files on
> the desktop: what happens when the naive user who doesn't organize his
> files in folders accumulates 100 files on the desktop? 

I'm saying the default download folder ought to be the desktop. Of course a 
user could change this by creating Desktop/Pron or whatever to download 
their hundreds of files too, and the fileselector should save its state and 
know this. If a user saves 100 files to the desktop, yes it will be a mess, 
but the files are both easy to find (they are right on the desktop) and can 
be easily moved into a new folder using cut and paste or drag and drop. I 
consider a user downloading hundreds of files onto the desktop a real edge 
case here. Most users won't do that, and user who will download that much 
usually have the sense to store files in a subfolder of the desktop. 

> Or ar you saying that we should have a ~/Desktop/Documents folder by
> default and save files into it?

No they should be saved to the desktop by default (at least from the web 
browser). There is something to be said for including some default desktop 
folders (Documents, Music, Mail [assuming a good mail view]), however the 
issue usually breaks down when we need to start worrying about i18n and the 
fact the filesystem folder names can't be translated. One solution is to use 
.directory files to name these folders, but as alex has pointed out in the 
past this leads to a remarkable slowdown in nautilus performance. 

> To me also that is not good: first it is yet another thing managed by
> the system that is put on the desktop, second it would be more painful
> to go to those documents by other means (eg the shell) respect to
> ~/Documents... 

The shell is not a concern to me here. The shell is used by technical users 
only. These users can easily do "cd ~/De [tab]/Docum [tab]". Inflicting a 
slight inconvenience on the most technical users to the benefit of the 
majority of normal users seems like a good tradeoff imo. 


> From: Julien Olivier <julo altern org>
> What's the advantage of storing your documents in ~/Desktop/Documents
> instead of ~/ ? I mean Home is already on the desktop so I don't see the
> point of having Home _and_ Documents on your desktop. 

I'm arguing for the removal of the Home icon from the desktop. For better or 
worst home is not really a good directory for non-technical users to mulling 
(sic?) around in. They can do alot of damage to their setup by using the 
home folder especially considering folders like ~/evolution are not hidden. 
ITs better imo to deem ~/ a system folder that users shouldn't be using to 
work with files. Instead ~/Desktop and its subfolders should be the users 
workspace. 

> Like I said before, it's not about _me_: it is not a problem _I_ have, I
> do use subfolders.
> It's about corner cases: having thousands of file in your homedir it's
> unpractical and slow, but not broken, having them on the desktop it's
> broken since the desktop has a fixed size (which btw depends on the
> resolution).

This indeed a corner case. I'm not arguing that home ought to be desktop. 
Actually with the setup i've proposed above I no longer think it really 
makes any difference from a user standpoint. Regarding large numbers of 
files on the desktop, this is indeed an edge case. In UI design you give 
presidence to the normal case over the edge case. Most users (99%) won't 
need to worry about this edge case at all. To me that is a fair tradeoff. 

dave