Comments on: Translated desktop folders in Gnome/Fedora

By: Jon Cooper

Jon Cooper — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

Fantastic!

Great work and yet more polish on an already great product

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

Sounds interesting. I’m not 100% how it works though.

Two questions:
1. What if the dir already exists, and wasn’t created by this program – will it be renamed?
2. What if the user switches language?

By: Emmanuele Bassi

Emmanuele Bassi — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

I’m still not yet convinced about translating the name of the directory on the physical storage of the user, the dependency on a tool running at login time being the biggest issue (but also collisions and support for non local storage come to mind).

but, anyway is a start.

my plans for switching the file chooser bookmarks to the xbel storage used by the recent files would make it probably easier to update the places.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

I’d just assume keep the thing called Desktop and Documents and translate the UI. This is going to introduce all sorts of issues into a distributed network environment.

What if Documents isn’t really a folder, but a symlink? How will it know if the folder already exists, if it’s in a different language?

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

MS made this same mistake. Please don’t do this. Keep the on disk storage static and use the UI to emit translations. I do not want to have to call an API to discover the location of Desktop and Documents like on a Windows platform.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

Also, what if you log on twice, from two different locations, with different translations? What happens then?

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

“and asks you if you want to move your directories to the new language”…

I can imagine this causing a lot of grief for non techie users.

“What folders?”
“Move them, why?”
“What will happen to all my stuff?”
etc…
etc…

It’s an implementation detail they shouldn’t be bothered with. If you feel that you absolutely have to bother them… well… maybe it’s something wrong with the implementation. Anyway, hope this can be worked out so you don’t have to pester them.

(Btw, good to finally get some movement on this issue. Keep up the good work.)

By: Goran Rakić

Goran Rakić — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

Great idea, but why not keep static folders and create localized hard-links on startup? Then we can keep them in some config file for every login session so applications can use them instead.

When user login with a new locale, we can just create new hardlinks. Once user loggout from every session using previous locale we can remove hardlinks that are not in use anymore.

Legacy applications will be able to use static folders and new apps can use localized hardlinks and both for legacy and new apps users will be able to open files from localized hardlinks.

We can even hide static folders from UI if localized hardlinks are present.

The only problem I see with this is that in legacy applications, user will be able to see both localized hardlinks and static folder and may dare to remove it (as it is the same as content of localized folder) not realizing it's hardlink. Don't know how to solve that.

By: Luca Ferretti

Luca Ferretti — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

Alex, could you put patches somewhere in bugzilla? Or at least list fedora patched modules.

By: Alan

Alan — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

A few days ago, I saw the discussion for this spec on the xdg mailing list, and decided to have a go at creating some Tango-style icons to correspond to each folder. It's somewhat incomplete, but you can see it here: http://stalefries.googlepages.com/tangoicons