Re: templates patch ...

[David Zeuthen <david fubar dk>]

On Mon, 2008-06-30 at 16:35 +0100, Michael Meeks wrote:
> Hi David,
> 
> On Mon, 2008-06-30 at 10:42 -0400, David Zeuthen wrote:
> > I'm worried that people end up with menus like these
> 
> 	Sure - but empirically this has not proved to be the case in KDE - so
> we can relax ;-)

I don't really buy this anecdotal evidence. What you are suggesting is
an ABI for ISV's and thus it is bound to be abused. Just see here for
some evidence

http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2006/11/01/922449.aspx

IOW, I don't think your approach scales.

> >  Create Document -> OpenOffice Writer ODF document
> >                     Abiword ODF document
> >                     KOffice ODF document
> 
> 	Presumably all of them creating the same blank ODF document ;-) which
> sounds pretty lame.

Indeed. Yet, it's high-value real estate so ISV's (including open source
projects of course) will of course abuse it.

> 
> > So I don't think this feature you're suggesting is going to help anyone,
> > see e.g. how bad this works on Windows. This is why I'm opposed to the
> > feature.
> 
> 	So - how can an administrator create default templates in these places
> for all users of all systems they administer ? And - as a better
> question: what default templates should a general purpose desktop come
> with ? what document types are sufficiently generally useful to make
> them easy to create anywhere.

Now that's an interesting question. It's similar to what I hinted in my
earlier mail. What default folders should we create in the users home
directory? And how do we create and maintain them without getting in the
way of the user? And how do we avoid abuse by ISV's? Alex already
answered that question with xdg-user-dirs. 

Now, xdg-user-dirs allows system administrators (not ISV's, there's no
directory that is traversed e.g. evil ISV's would have to rewrite config
files in /etc) to define directories to be created in the users home
directory. 

My suggestion is to do the same for files. So your stock OS install
would create

 New Empty Word Processor Document (ODF)
 New Empty Presentation (ODF)

depending on what kind of users your OS targets. And if I'm a customer
(e.g. Acme Corp) and deploys your OS in my organization I can go in and
edit the moral equivalent of /etc/xdg/user-dirs.defaults to add my own
templates. For example, I'd add 

 New Acme Corp Sales Presentations (OOXML)
 New Acme Corp Timesheets (OOXML)

or whatever. Now, the salaried employees of Acme Corp can just delete
"New Acme Corp Timesheets (OOXML)" and the engineer employees of Acme
Corp can delete "New Acme Corp Sales Presentations (OOXML)". And
probably the engineers would delete "New Empty Word Processor Document
(ODF)" too ;-)

Further, it will be possible to ensure these templates can a) be
renamed; and b) stay deleted; using similar mechanism already employed
by the xdg-user-dirs framework.

> 	But - really, my question is: why do the defaults suck here ? and what
> can we do about it; my patch improves that I think. If you don't like
> the defaults, you can hassle the packagers of your operating system to
> improve things. And yes - any sane distribution will by default (cf. KDE
> ad nauesum) not shove endless junk into your templates menu.

The problem with your approach is that it's an interface for ISV's. And
you really don't want that. What you do want, however, is an interface
for the system administrator that the ISV's can't abuse.

> 	My problem is, perhaps that I don't understand the existing Templates
> system you refer to. Here is my use case:
> 
> 	* hot plug USB device
> 	* nautilus window pops up showing nice blank space
> 	* [ I want to create a new document in here ]
> 
> 	My thesis is a right-click Templates menu should be -useful- at least
> on a new, blank install of a new user: and that (in general) the
> defaults should be good enough to do something useful out of the box.
> They are under KDE ;-)

I largely agree with this use case. But I think it's a grave mistake to
export this as an interface for ISV's. The other problem is that the
user is no longer in control. He can't delete these templates. And
that's why it's NAK from me to this patch if I were the maintainer. 

So I think it's a lot better to explore how to create an interface for
the system administrator that is hard for ISV's to abuse.

Making it similar to xdg-user-dirs, as sketched above, is just one idea
that I came up with after thinking about the problem for less than an
hour. I'm sure there are more elegant solutions.

       David