Dolphin starts programs with a wrong current directory

[Nikos Chantziaras]

On 12/12/2009 11:02 AM, James Tyrer wrote:
> Nikos Chantziaras wrote:
>> [...] $PWD is not the Documents directory.  The Documents directory is
>> the... Documents directory.  The $PWD is the $PWD.
>>
>> Now the above sounded pretty dump, but really obvious things tend to do
>> that.  So why does Dolphin think that ~/Documents is the $PWD?  Those
>> two are *not* the same thing.  And after the lengthy explanations given
>> in this thread, this approach even contradicts previous statements about
>> how things are supposed to work on Unix systems.
>>
>> Bottom line, if an app wants access to the ~/Documents directory, it
>> should *say so*.  From how I see it, relying that $PWD is ~/Documents is
>> a broken design too for the reasons you wrote previously :)  Sorry, you
>> can't have it both ways.
>>
> (bottom line)^2 is that this (KDE) is a GUI.  A GUI does not work the
> same as the underlying OS.  MS-Windows is the same.  It looks for user
> files in MyDocuments.  I don't have MS-Windows so I don't know if it
> uses MyDocuments for the "cd" or not.

Windows and Gnome work the way one would think.  Current directory is 
whatever you're looking at at any given time.

Being a GUI doesn't mean you should not be able to launch programs that 
expect their files to be in the same directory, *regardless* of whether 
such programs should be considered broken or not.


> And, as I said, if an executable needs access to data, it should keep
> it/look for it in the proper place and not rely on it being (improperly)
> stored in the /bin directory with the executable.  On *NIX, it is not
> proper to store data in a /bin directory as was common practice with
> PC-DOS.  You don't seem to be getting that.

No, I am getting that.  What I don't get is why Dolphin can't do what 
other GUIs do and tries to do it's own thing "because it's a GUI," 
totally ignoring expected behavior.  What I also don't get is why 
Dolphin should expect the world to write application the way it thinks 
is best instead of simply allowing already existing applications to 
continue working as they always have (and still do in pretty much 
everything except Dolphin.)

Also, GUIs are there to make the CLI less relevant.  If a GUI can't 
replace the CLI even for the simple task for launching a program in it's 
current directory, then something's wrong.

And I yet have to hear a reason of why Dolphin can't do what I described 
:P  Why exactly would it be wrong?  Because it would allow "broken" 
programs to keep working like they always did?  IMO that's not up to 
Dolphin to decide.  Dolphin should be able to be used with non-KDE apps 
too.  And what would it break?  Gnome and Windows users seem to do just 
fine.  (Unless there *is* a setting somewhere to configure that, of 
course.  But I didn't find any.)

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