Re: [Usability]The messy world of applications files

[snickell stanford edu]

Quoting "S. Boucher" <stephane boucher videotron ca>:

> Sunnanvind Fenderson wrote:
> 
> >Gnome's futuresque solution to this issue is called "gconf", an xml
> >database stored in ~/.gconf/ .
> >
> Except that this doesn't seem to address the issue of config vs
> personal 
> data. (e.g. mouse preferences/menus vs contact list/mail archive).
> 
> Also, it isn't likely at all that all applications writers will rush
> to 
> use this.
> 
> What I'm talking about is asking apps writers to seperate config vs 
> personal data, and make it obvious for the user how to backup
> things.
> 
> ...But I'll have to read more about gconf.

I agree with this, we need to make the distinction between preferences
and personal data clear, and particularly for personal data it needs to
be easy to find for backup purposes (and preferably standardized).
Having visible folders per-application-with-user-data in the home
directory seems like a bad idea, but having a single folder that all
GNOME applications use might be workable. This does entail a
responsibility on developer's part to only put sensible
user-understandable files in that directory. Cryptic short names and the
like are right out ;-)

I think we need to make backup/copying of preferences easy to access as
well, though how to do this is less clear now that the GConf XML
infrastructure is already setup in a manner that obscures this. Perhaps
some sort of GnomeVFS URI could be setup (and "mounted" in somewhere
non-obscure in the home directory) that encapsulates the information in
each directory as a file that can be copied in and out. The idea is not
to provide per-key granularity, but so you could take all the
preferences for an app and copy them in and out. Maybe we could just
display the keys contained in each schemas file or something (so you
could save and restore keys as a package containing all the keys defined
in a particular schemas file).

-Seth