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

[Miguel de Icaza <miguel ximian com>]

> This change by itself will cause people who switch from Ximian's Nautilus to
> a non-Ximian Nautilus or vice versa to lose all their desktop icons, because
> there's no code to move files between the desktop directories. I think this
> is a recipe for disaster.

We could add some migration code that moves the contents of the old
~/.nautilus/desktop to ~/.gnome-desktop

If you are interested I can do it. 

> This does make the experience for existing gmc users deluxe, but we
> introduce incompatibility between one company's Nautilus, the other versions
> of Nautilus that have already been released, and future versions of
> Nautilus.

Right now there are more gmc users than Nautilus users (if only
because gmc has been wildely deployed for a couple of years now).

> Can we discuss how to deal with this? I have no great ideas, but I am
> worried about it. I wish we had made this change before widely releasing
> Nautilus, but now we have to deal with the existing Nautilus users,
> I think.

I think the best thing we can do is have Nautilus detect the presence
of ~/.nautilus/desktop and move everything but the thing it knows how
to recreate into ~/.gnome-desktop

> A number of Nautilus users have already requested that the desktop go into a
> directory with a simpler name. ~/.gnome-desktop is shorter than
> ~/.nautilus/desktop, but I was hoping for something even better. (For
> example, tigert wants ~ to just "be the desktop".)

I heard about Tuomas' ~ idea for the desktop.  It is definetly an
interesting concept, but one that might not fly given the current Unix
user base.   That is just my feeling right now about Tuomas' idea

Miguel.