[CREATE] shared resources spec

[Alan Horkan]

On Thu, 6 Oct 2005, Kai-Uwe Behrmann wrote:

> Date: Thu, 6 Oct 2005 20:43:31 +0200 (CEST)
> From: Kai-Uwe Behrmann <ku.b at gmx.de>
> Reply-To: Kunst Tuepfel <create at lists.freedesktop.org>
> To: Bryce Harrington <bryce at bryceharrington.org>
> Cc: Kunst Tuepfel <create at lists.freedesktop.org>
> Subject: Re: [CREATE] shared resources spec
>
> Am 06.10.05, 09:59 -0700 schrieb Bryce Harrington:
>
> > On Thu, Oct 06, 2005 at 09:48:02AM -0700, Jon Phillips wrote:
> > > Art tends to place a value upon what type of standards we are
> > > consolidating. Hence, when coming up with the ideas for the Create
> > > Project we batted around different concerns and settled on the concept
> > > that this is to be space for creative application developers to work on
> > > shared "things" together.
> > >
> > > Thus, art tends to be a little too specific, yet media is a general term
> > > to describe what the various creative applications use and operate on.
> > > Plus, the various swatches, clip art, possibly samples, video loops etc
> > > seem more general than art, which infers some type of high or low brow
> > > cultural value we are adding to the standard UNIX path system
> > >
> > > Thus, I'm still fully pushing for media.
> > >
> > > Yes, I understand that udev and hal use media now for mounting, but
> > > still, I think media is the most general for our needs. However, second
> > > choice would be to use: create or creative
> > >
> > > I prefer:
> > >
> > > /usr/share/media/clipart
> > > /usr/share/media/samples
> > > /usr/share/media/swatches
> >
> > Agreed.  People don't get the 'media' in 'multimedia' mixed up thinking
>
> The root directory of many distros shows the term is allready occupied
> with usb, cdrom, dvd and so on.

I am baffled why they ever moved things from /mnt/ to /media/

There is only one reason which comes to mind but if you really wanted to
have a more user friendly filesystem like Mac OS it requires a more
comprehensive solution (or possible the suggestion that media are
particualrly "removable media" but far as I'm concerned that is an even
more useless distinction and all media is removable if your hardware and
software is advanced enough).  Any benefit from this minor change seems
hardly worth the confusion.  If it were up to me I would revert that
decision immediately (but obviously it isn't).  If anyone knows the
rationale behind this seemingly arbitrary decision I'd love to know (feel
free to mail me on or off list if you prefer).

Also Gnome Volume Manager is a program for managing removable media, so
not only do we have the term media which is overloaded to mean the plural
of media, but also mutlimedia (audio+video) we also have the term Volume
overloaded to mean both storage media and the loudness.

There are times when I hate the English language /endrant

We didn't make the mess but we are stuck with it.

> Media means transportations in the heads. With this background media is
> ambigous. It is further ambigous to things like gradients and swatches,
> like arts as well.

art might be okay but I'm worried that ARTS is an old unloved sound system
I'm undecided between art and media

> Maybe an other term would be better at all.

I wonder how the original UNIX designers ever decided things like
/mnt
/usr
/share
/dev
/etc

and perhaps there is a convention or logic behind it all we should be
trying to following?  do we have any Unix researchers or filesystem
experts we can ask?  I'm not sure I'd even know where to start asking but
I am always inclined to ask an expert or find some standard we can follow
or extend (which is what brought me this far).

also we have /usr/share/pixmaps which to me suggests someone might
have planned to organise things in /usr/share/ roughly based on mime type
but we don't have corresponding entries for
/usr/share/video
/usr/share/audio
/usr/share/vector  (there are quite a few SVG in the pixmaps directory)

I really wish there was some rule we could use to help use reach a
decision or at least narrow things down but I think we can at least say
(and effectively already have said) verbose hyphenated names might not be
a good idea and succint one word phrases are preferable.

Sincerely

Alan Horkan
http://advogato.org/person/AlanHorkan/

Open Clip Art http://OpenClipArt.org