"Folder" or "Directory"?

[Lauri Watts]

On Monday 20 October 2003 11.54, Craig Drummond wrote:
> > Could we please stop this useless discussion. Obviously the decision has
> > 

> Why is this discussion useless? Obviosuly I'm not the only one who thinks
> "Folder" is more appropriate / user-friendly.

I dispute that no decision has ever been made, because a firm decision was 
indeed reached on kde-i18n by many of the people concerned including the 
English docs and proofreading team, several years ago, after a long 
discussion covering virtually the same ground that's been regurgitated here 
lately.

As a policy, it has also been rather consistently applied.  A quick look 
through the translation templates shows 1830+ occurernces of 'directory' 
almost invariably referring to directories on disk, and 820+ occurrences of 
folder, with most of those occurring in kmail, knode, and their associated 
tools and docs, and a few more turning up in kdemultimedia in what looks like 
a consistent manner (referring to playlist folders etc.)  There's a few 
outliers, mostly in kdesdk and kdevelop, but it would be a fairly minor job 
to clean up the remaining uses that are inconsistent with current policy.

If you really feel this strongly about it,  I suggest it is raised again on 
kde-doc-english (the appropriate list for the proofreaders, who will be most 
impacted by such a change, since they implement and enforce it) and/or 
kde-i18n (bearing in mind the large impact changing 1830+ strings would have 
for translators).   But not now, when everyone concerned is drowned in work 
with a release coming up.  Much better would be immediately after 3.2 when 
HEAD is reopened, when it is the least intrusive time to make massive changes 
to translateable strings.   Translators are users too, remember.

Even better, raise it at an appropriate time, in an appropriate place, along 
with carefully hand checked patches that won't break anything - said patches 
allowing for the fact that "Directory" has other legitimate uses including 
"phone directory", "LDAP directory" and plenty more, and that it's an 
attribute in docbook, so a global search and replace will not be appropriate 
for either GUI strings or docs.  Maybe even patches fixing all the existing 
translations so that nobody will have to manually mark each and every newly 
"fuzzy" translation in every language as "translated" by hand.  People will 
be much more amenable to change on this scale when it isn't going to cost 
them several hard-to-find hours of work to clean up after you.

We've gone a dozen or so releases already with this scheme, and 3.2 is not the 
last release KDE will ever make, so for me this just has to fall into the 
'it's really not very urgent, if you care so much, be prepared to do the 
work' category.

Regards,
-- 
Lauri Watts
KDE Documentation: http://i18n.kde.org/doc/
KDE on FreeBSD: http://freebsd.kde.org/
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