Re: Mega patch to make spatial nautilus rock!

["John (J5) Palmieri" <johnp redhat com>]

First I want to say thank you for taking the time to submit your patch.
I don't want to discourage you from submitting in the future and in fact
hope you come up with other patches and enjoy working within the Gnome
community.  I say this because I want you to also realize that some of
what you submitted may never become part of Nautilus proper.  At least
not in the current form.  Gnome has a vision and any enhancements need
to fit in that vision or prove that vision wrong.  One advice is to
split your feature set into separate patches so that the stuff that
isn't all that controversial have an easier time of making it in.  Below
are some more comments that will hopefully be helpful to you.

On Fri, 2004-07-09 at 00:52 +0100, Jamie McCracken wrote:
> On Fri, 2004-07-09 at 00:35, Christian Schneider wrote:
> 
> > I think the current settable behaviour of open a new window and close 
> > the current one is much more useful.
> 
> Thats fine if you like that as I'm not changing the default - merely
> giving the user the ability to define left and middle clicks ("open in
> new window", "open in new window and close behind" and "open in same
> window" are all options for both buttons). I believe in giving the users
> the choice here cause its a highly contentious issue and forcing any
> setting here is bound to annoy and anger users.

We got away from this when we switched to gnome-2.0.  The thing is too
much configuration causes multiple unmaintainable code paths and it
really is a guise for flaking on making hard decisions.  You can't
please everybody all the time.  

> > It avoids cluttering the screen with windows and still behaves spatial.
> > If you open a new window with the same dimensions like the current you 
> > loose the only real advantage of spatial mode: The possibility to 
> > remember folders based on their position and their size. 
> 
> Yes but if you want to drill down quickly you dont care about size and
> pos. 

This is what browser mode is for.  I would suggest you take some of your
hybrid ideas and see if they integrate well within the browser.  I don't
know if this is an option but perhaps making it easier to morph a window
between browser and spacial mode would kill the need for a hybrid mode
and therefor eliminate the need for a third hybrid codepath.    

> On my desktop I have 6 links which all open spatially and I
> remember their positions and thats great (spatial in this instance
> really works for me). I can then choose whether to open sub folders in
> them in new windows or the same - its my choice at the end of the day
> and therefore I can get the benefits of both worlds.

Well you have just described why we have browser/spatial and have not
just eliminated browser all together.

> 
> >  In spatial 
> > mode you even know where a certain file inside a small folder is before 
> > the folder opens.
> 
> I agree thats good and thats why i want a hybrid system! Some of my
> links do benefit from that but others with deeper hierarchies dont and
> lets face it any user is only ever going to remember a handful of
> folders properties so a hybrid system is very useful for that.

Whats wrong with browser mode for the deep hierarchies?  If its broken
then perhaps it can be fixed.

> > 
> > The only thing needed is the same behaviour when moving upwards.
> > 
> > Besides this I really like your enhancements. Especially the bookmark 
> > integration and the location path at the bottom are nice.
> 

I agree bookmark enhancements were a good thing.  Thats why you should
break it out into its own patch.

-- 
John (J5) Palmieri
Associate Software Engineer
Desktop Group
Red Hat, Inc.
Blog: http://martianrock.com