Unifying ~/Desktop

[bordoley at msu.edu]

Issues:

1. The home .desktop file used by nautilus is dynamically created so that it
can be titled "User name's" Home. Personally i wouldn't be too againt just
calling it Home or Home folder as this would make the gnome-panel Home Folder
launcher consistant with Home folder on the desktop. (see bug 74906 at b.g.o)

2. The home icon that nautilus creates on the desktop is persistent, eg. users
can't remove it. How would the change you propose affect this.

3. Until the new freedesktop icon spec is adopted by nautilus and konqueror,
how will your proposal affect nautilus's ability to theme the home icon. (Many
nautilus themes change this icon)

4. The biggest problem i see with this proposal is trash handling. Nautilus
and konqueror handle this very differently. Konqueror creates a trash folder
in the desktop directory in which it stores all trash files. Nautilus creates
.trash files on the various file systems per users which are than integrated
by the trash view. Nautilus's trash icon on the desktop is simply a .desktop
file that launches the trash view. Should nautilus simply not display konq's
trash folder on the desktop and in the file manager view of the desktop folder?

5. Nautilus also offers the option to use the home dir as the desktop. Granted
this is an advance feature, any changes to how nautilus handles the desktop
need to take this preference into account as many users and developers prefer
using the home dir as the desktop. 

In general I think cooperation and integrationg between gnome, kde and the
other X desktops is a very good thing. My main concern as someone interested
in gnome is that we don't sacrifice features in favor of desktop integration.


dave


Havoc Pennington <hp at redhat.com> said:
> 
> The big outstanding issue: we need to do Home and Trash in the same
> way, or at least ignore each other's Home and Trash. In GNOME, both of
> these are desktop files but with somewhat funky/nonstandard
> contents. I think in KDE Home is a desktop file and Trash is a
> directory? Worse, the filenames are ~/Desktop/Trash and
> ~/.gnome-desktop/Trash so they collide.
> 
> ~/.gnome-desktop/Trash is special-cased anyhow, so it's possibly quite
> easy for us to move to using a directory here. I haven't looked at it
> yet.
> 
> 
> Comments? Can we get this fix adopted upstream if we make the patches?
> 
> Thanks for any help in solving this problem.
> 
> Havoc