Re: volumes mark 2

[Paolo Borelli <pborelli katamail com>]

On Mon, 2003-09-22 at 14:44, Alexander Larsson wrote:

<snip>

> Instead you would have total confusion about what directory is stored
> where, and where directories appear if you create them. This sounds like
> the worst sort of thing you could do to the mental model people will

I agree that my proposal has drawbacks...

> create. Either we expose the homedir as a concept, or we try to avoid
> using it by default. Thats the only two sane choices. (Well, the third
> would be make them the same.)
> 

At this point my opinion is that we should continue to expose homedir as
a concept. Not using it by default may seem appealing in theory, but you
have to take in account that users will be faced with the homedir
concept anyway, even if we change all the gnome apps.

I can at least think of:
- third party apps which default to save in a folder cretaed in ~
- existng installation where users have their file in home

Even if my idea of using links on the desktop was even worse, AFAICS
also in your proposal $HOME would not be easily accessible from the
desktop.


After all I think that on a normal install the only annoying visible
directory in home is evolution and that is going away with the next
release.

As jdub pointed out Destop it's great for storing transient things (the
tarball you just downloaded, the text file you're editing, etc), but
IMHO should not be used as a place for _all_ the user stuff.

As an example I have lots of subfolders in my home, but since I access
some of them only seldom, I don't want all of them to clutter my
desktop; if $home becomes not easily accessible, what I should do is
group 'em up in a "Seldom Used" folder and put that one into Desktop:
that has at least 2 disadvantages 1) I have one more folder on my
desktop 2) I have one more level of indirection to retrieve those files
(in fact _two_ more levels of indirection from the shell ~/foo becomes
~/Desktop/SeldomUsed/foo )
(I know I can easily work around this by creating a homedir link on my
desktop, but it does seem to me a quite common usage that should work
out of the box)


ciao
	paolo