Re: spacial

[Alexander Larsson <alexl redhat com>]

On Thu, 2004-04-29 at 03:00, Thorsten Wilms wrote:
> On Fri, Apr 30, 2004 at 10:55:06AM -0400, Dave Camp wrote:
> > On Fri, 2004-04-30 at 09:19 -0500, Jerry Haltom wrote:
> 
> > > Has any consideration been made into auto filling templates into
> > > ~/Templates? /usr/share/templates, etc?
> > 
> > We've mostly decided to leave this up to the admin/distro/whatever.
> > Presumably admins of large sites have some sort of mechanism for
> > distributing site-specific files to users.
> 
> Hm, seems at least Gentoo leaves that to the user/whatever.
> 
> I think there should be a standard for apps providing templates. 
> If not directly filling template folders there could be a
> 'template library' for just copying over the desired ones. 
> 
> The admin or user shouldn't be expected to go through all apps for 
> manualy generating new files to put them in place.

This was also a conscious decision. If we allowed apps to install global
templates the templates directory would be full of crap like "create
<app> file" for all a) apps the user doesn't run and b) templates the
user doesn't use. 

The goal of the templates dir is to contain actually used actual
templates. By this i don't mean empty files of a specific filetype, but
rather templates in the higher level meaning. You'd place things like an
empty TPS report there, or your weekly status report. It's not meant to
be a way to basically launch apps (which it would otherwise quickly turn
into), that problem needs to be solved in a better way.

Even real document templates, that are generic rather than specific to
your company/organization/whatever are bad. Dumping, say, all the MS
Office templates into a global templates directory would instantly make
the menu huge, impossible to find things in and full of stuff you never
user. Thats not useful.

This is exactly the reason the directory is a *normal* folder. None of
the virtual stuff, none of the merging. Its a normal folder, people
*should* see it, and they *should* modify it. That is what makes it
useful. And if you don't use it, just delete it (or never create it) and
live happily ever after.