Re: Several comments on panel, nautilus and evolution

[Erik Bågfors <bagfors pdc kth se>]

On Sun, Sep 03, 2000 at 11:25:54AM -0400, Dan Winship wrote:
> 
> > There has been a tendency of programs creating directories in the
> > home directory *without* a dot prefix. How about Nautilus and
> > Evolution using .nautilus, .trash and .evolution instead of
> > Nautilus, Trash and Evolution or at least giving the user the
> > choice of naming these directories.
> 
> I can't speak for Nautilus, but in Evolution, that's not a bug, that's
> a feature. Dotfiles are hidden, which is fine for config files and
> other things that you want to make non-obvious. But the "evolution"
> directory is used to store all of the user's local mail, contacts,
> appointments, etc, which is user data, not configuration. You don't
> want to hide the user's mail from him.

The way I see it this is not the way it should be.

Hidden directories should be for things that you don't normaly work (poke
around) with.
Evolution will do most the work in the evolution-directory and you don't
want to mess with it alot outside of evolution. Therefore it should be a
hidden dir.

.netscape/bookmarks.html is another example of a file that is not a 
config-file but since only netscape should need to care about it, it's
hidden.

.gnome-desktop is another example.  gmc (and future nautilus) should handle
this directory (or .nautilus or....) and not the user himself.

/Erik

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Erik Bågfors               | Center for Parallel Computers
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