well-known user folders, a proposal

[Alexander Larsson]

On Fri, 2007-02-23 at 09:36 -0600, Shaun McCance wrote:
> On Thu, 2007-02-22 at 12:11 +0100, Alexander Larsson wrote:
> > There is also a --force flag that ignores any existing user settings
> > and just creates and sets up localized dirs. This is useful if there
> > has been a new translation added and you want to update to that. We
> > can't really do this automatically since the old filename might be
> > stored in all sorts of places.
> 
> When we've discussed things like this on desktop-devel-list
> in the past, it's been said that people sometimes log in the
> first time in English, because they don't know any better,
> and then subsequently log in in their own language.
>
> This method would cause the English folders to be created
> early in the first login, precluding them from getting the
> proper translation later.  Users, by and large, won't know
> they can run `xdg-user-dirs-update --force`, so they'll be
> stuck with those folder names.  I don't know what to do to
> solve this.

This isn't ideal, and its one of the disadvantages of this solution. All
solutions have weaknesses though, and I think this is the best overall. 
It could possibly be solved by having the desktop detect this case after
login and ask wheter the user would like to update the names. That is up
to each desktop though.

> One other point is that I don't think users can be expected
> to edit a config file to change their folders.  We should
> strongly advise that file managers automatically update the
> user config file when the user renames the folder.  We can't
> do anything about `mv` obviously, but we can do what we can.

In general, this proposal only touches the lowest level of
standardization. Layered on top of this i expect the desktops to figure
out all sorts of cool shit that they can do.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
 Alexander Larsson                                            Red Hat, Inc 
                   alexl at redhat.com    alla at lysator.liu.se 
He's a short-sighted pirate messiah on a mission from God. She's a 
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