Re: [Nautilus-list] Integration of gmc and nautilus desktop directories.

[Christian Rose <menthos df lth se>]

On Sat, 14 Apr 2001, Jon Trowbridge wrote:
[...]
> The current thinking on the evolution team is to change it from
> "evolution/" to "Evolution/", so it will be at the beginning of your
> ls, rather than mixed in with all of your files, and won't be confused
> with a CVS checkout of evolution...  at GUADEC I heard a report of one
> person who rm -rf-ed it because of this).

If the only reason to change it was so that the directory would be shown
first by ls, then that reasoning is a bit broken. There's no guarantee at
all that capitalized names will be shown before non-capitalized names - it
all depends on what locale you use and that locale's sorting rules. ls
uses those sorting rules.

I use the sv_SE locale here and it is agnostic to upper- and lowercase.
And if the only difference between two entries is the capitalization of one of
the letters, it will sort the one with an uppercase letter *after* the one
with a lower-case letter (lexigraphical sorting). I just tried out the
en_US locale and it behaves the same way. The only locale I know of that will
always sort uppercase before lowercase without exceptions is the C locale, and
you can't really expect that to be used other by some programmers and
a bunch of experienced unix people that are used to that way of sorting.

So assuming "this will be shown first" or "this will be shown last" in the
user's view is always broken. But naming the directory "Evolution" could
be a good idea for other reasons.


Christian