Re: [Usability]The messy world of applications files

["S. Boucher" <stephane boucher videotron ca>]

snickell stanford edu wrote:

> 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,
It is bad, but it is done today with various apps using various <dot> 
directories.

> but having a single folder that all
> GNOME applications use might be workable.
Just be open to non-gnome applications too.

> 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 ;-)
Actually, I don't care what the name is, so long as I have an easy way 
to distinguish between personal data and configs.

> 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).
Was the intent of gconf to also be used for address books, mail archives 
and such?  Or was it just for application preferences?