Re: volumes mark 2

[Paolo Borelli <pborelli katamail com>]

On Fri, 2003-09-19 at 19:41, David Adam Bordoley wrote:
> From: Paolo Borelli <pborelli katamail com> 
> 
> > What about instead creating these folders in the homedir and put by
> > default .desktop files (or symlinks?) on the desktop? 
> >
> > 
> 
> Well using .desktop files can be a potential pain here I pressume from a 
> programming point of view. You would need to special this set to act like 
> folders and though I'm not a nautilus coder, I'm pretty sure this would get 
> messy pretty quick. KISS is my motto :) 
> 

I was not arguing about the implementation, if .desktop files are not
the right approach, let's use symlinks or in-memory objects or
whatever... I was just saying that these folders should be easyly
accesible from the desktop, but they should not physycally be into the
desktop exposing the detail that the desktop is a folder.


> > What I mean is: 
> > 
> > ~/Desktop 
> > 
> > and 
> > 
> > ~/Documents
> > ~/Images
> > etc 
> > 
> 
> And what happens when the user selects the "Open Parent Folder" menu item (I 
> pressume we will want to add this to aid in traversing hierarchy)? Folder in 
> the desktop folder could simply disable this action but folder in $home 
> would open home. Basically it just creates a mess of potential interacttion 
> problems. 
> 

I don't really see why going up one level and being in $home would be
confusing: you would see a _normal_ folder containing a list of dirs
like "Documents", "Images" etc. I think that's way less confusing than
special casing stuff like disabling the "Open parent folder" or going in
a special dir called Desktop (as I said above most of the users don't
think of Desktop as a folder).

Creating Documents and putting a link to it on the desktop while not
putting a link to home is just a nice way to convince the casual user to
keep his files organized in subfolders and do not mess much with home.


> > 
> > * still preserving the unix concept of homedir (not-gnome apps and the
> > shell would simply see ~/documents etc)
> 
> This can be solved easily by running apps with $CWD from within the 
> gnome-environment as alex has already pointed out. 
> 

Everithing can be solved... this does not mean that we should not pick
the right way of doing things.
Unix has a clean and simple place where users manage their stuff and it
is $home. Windows doesnt, so they have invented "My Documents" which is
poor-man equivalent to $home.
I have the impression that instead of doing the right thing and help
users to better organize their stuff in Home we are creating a copy of
the copy, hoping that hiding stuff would make things better.

> > 
> > IIRC this is also pretty much the way Windows works:
> > each user has his part of the filesystem (equivalent to home) which
> > contains, among other things Desktop and Documents. 
> > 
> 
> The windows filesystem hierarchy is an example of how not to do stuff. 
> 

The fact that Windows sucks is not an argumentation for doing things in
this or that way. I was not saying that my idea is good because is
similar to Windows, as a matter of fact what I'm trying to defend is the
natural unix concept of $home.


ciao
	paolo