Re: Structure in $HOME

[Sander Vesik <sander_traveling yahoo co uk>]

 --- Seth Nickell <snickell stanford edu> wrote: > On Wed, 2003-01-15 at 15:09, Alan
Horkan wrote:
> > 
> > On Wed, 15 Jan 2003, Martin Waitz wrote:
> > 
> > > and what do you do with non-english speaking users?
> > >
> > > localizing file names sucks
> > 
> > What to do?
> > 
> > You take a long hard look at what Microsoft have done.  ditto Apple (in
> > fact look at apple first) KDE and anyone else you care to think of.
> > Compare copy and improve, or "embrace and extend if you prefer".
> 
> Microsoft releases specifically customised versions of Windows for many
> locales. I suspect this is not a good long term option for Linux
> desktops, especially if we would like our desktops to work well for even
> relatively small "3rd world" language groups.
> 



> > Does this really need to be discussed in minute detail on the list?
> > What are the localised names for
> > /usr /bin /dev ?  (yes i am being facetious).
> 
> Yes, and its a great example of exactly why /usr, /bin and /dev are such
> shitty names. There's no localisation for them because, to a large
> extent, they are "nonsense" words. Even unlocalised English names would
> be better than nonsense names, though only marginally so (Proposing that
> traditional non-any-language names are a good solution is, imo, being a
> dog in the manger).

Well, there is no essential difference a 'nonsense name' and a 'unlocalised 
english name' if you don't speak English. But /usr, /bin, /etc and similar
directories are probbaly not something a normal users should even have to know 
about and so it doesn't really matter what they are called.

> 
> > With all the talk of URI's why dont we just have
> > /data with subdirs /img /doc /web /mp3 /ogg
> > and then use some nice URI to hide the complexity?
> 
> Because URIs introduce more complexity than they hide. They are not a
> good solution for user visible interfaces. If you're proposing them as
> an invisible technical solution, I'm not quite sure what the problem
> they are addressing is. Without building a complete filename resolution
> system into a virtual filesystem layer (accessed like a "URI"), which
> essentially means you bypass the "real" filesystem altogether, its
> pretty darn hard to localise the filenames.
> 

If the names are not user visible there is no need to localise them - 
it would be rather like having a gtk/british_english.h that would change 
the spelling of functions etc. to not be in 'american english'. If you 
applied the same thing to environment variables you wopuld suddenly have to 
know whetver you need to set $DISPLAY or $BILDSCHIRM and there would probably be
problems with shells & chinese computers.

> -Seth
> 

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