Re: Global templates

[Reinout van Schouwen <reinouts gnome org>]

Hello Danny,

On Sat, 20 Aug 2005, Danny Milosavljevic wrote:

> This is not possible for the exact reason to prevent distributors (or
> worse, applications) from including "a few" default templates with gnome
> (like "New docbook xslt dtd schema document", which obviously everyone
> and their brother needs ;)).

Don't you think it's a bit strange to hold back on a certain 
functionality that would benefit users, unexperienced ones in 
particular, because of the possibility that it might be abused?

To reiterate my comment on bug 312468:

I agree completely that the menu should not contain dozens of entries by 
default. But not trusting distributors to handle such a feature 
responsibly is a bit condescending. We need this, so that when for 
instance Abiword is installed, all users get a 'Abiword document' item 
under their right mouse button. Besides reducing the time needed to 
create a new empty document, this would 1) drastically improve the 
discoverability of the Templates feature; and 2) help the user to use 
GNOME in a document-oriented/spatial fashion.

Relying on users to create their own templates means that the majority 
of them will never learn about this possibility.

> If you as distribution want to put them in per default, put them
> into /etc/skel/Templates before creating the user, so the user later can
> at least get rid of the stuff he doesnt need and can change the
> templates.

This is not a working solution. What I have in mind is that for instance 
a 'Vector drawing' template appears in all users' templates once the 
system administrator installs the distro-provided Inkscape package, and 
that it disappears again when it's deinstalled. Of course, users should 
be free to "trash" (hide) global templates that they don't need.

> I'm sure you noticed that the $HOME/Templates folder is visible to the
> user. This is because it is for the user to put stuff in and edit or
> remove stuff. A global directory would only be annoying to the users.

Ah yes, that reminds me of bug 136836. "Templates" does not mean 
anything to non-English speakers.

regards,

--
Reinout van Schouwen