Re: SV: [Nautilus-list] Desktop folder

[Tuomas Kuosmanen <tigert ximian com>]

On Wed, 2002-03-20 at 19:07, Ettore Perazzoli wrote:
    > I dunno. I need to ask Ettore. Personally I wish to do a
    > s/evolution/.evolution/g as soon as possible, since there really is no
    > reason I can think of why it is a non-hidden dir. It's not like a user
    > should be going there to poke stuff with the filemanager..
    
    You might still want to do simple things like copying the directory over
    to another machine.

    If you make it hidden and you also make the desktop the only way to
    browse the home directory, then there is no way for an end user to back
    up his Evolution data and move it around.

Yea. Although it requires the use of a shell, unless you have some
graphical way of mounting the other machine and just dragging it there.
In most cases I guess one would use scp or something to transfer the
directory. In that case you need to write instructions anyway (or a
script maybe, might be a good idea?). And if you have instructions, you
can just as well add the dot there.
    
    It sure will be configurable at some point (1.2 most likely), but not in
    1.0.x and not because of Nautilus.

:-) Yea. I guess people have requested the same for other reasons too.
It "clutters your 'ls'" too :-)

By the way, speaking of the clutter of "ls" this is handy if you dont
like to see the .desktop files on your shell:

	alias ls="ls --ignore=\*"

Will not list .desktop files then. Of course "ls *.desktop" works if you
want to see them. Rather handy I think.
    
    BTW, if you don't want users to access the contents of directories like
    ~/evolution, we could add a metadata property that marks a directory as
    "non browsable by default", and when you enter it Nautilus could display
    some blurb about how the contents oou f the directory shouldn't be
    manipulated, unless the user does something explicit (like e.g. changing
    to the "Advanced" user level or clicking a "browse at my own risk"
    button or something).

That might be a good idea yeah, also for other dirs. Although the way
Windows does it for system directories is kind of pointless given the
permission stuff we have on unix. But it could do that for .gnome/ too.

OSX has $HOME/Library/ that stores all user settings stuff and libs and
such, keeping the homedir clean, since Mac apps dont traditionally
create dotfiles, but rather have their own directories for stuff.

    Please, no. :-)
    
    The desktop directory should just be easily accessible from file
    selectors.  KDE got it right by calling it ~/Desktop.

Maybe I am stupid but I really dont see good reasons why it wouldnt be a
good idea. Using it for a year, and it still makes sense, mind you. And
I use the desktop a _lot_. But I understand people who dont want files
on the desktop as well. People like Iain and you clearly use the desktop
for different purpose, thus it makes a lot of sense to keep it
configurable. Whatever the default is should not matter for "power
users" anyway since one can just configure it.

Tuomas

-- 
:: :: Tuomas Kuosmanen  :: Art Director, Ximian :: ::
:: :: tigert ximian com :: www.ximian.com       :: ::