Ross Burton <ross <at> burtonini.com> writes: > > On Wed, 2007-02-14 at 10:56 +0100, Christian F.K. Schaller wrote: > > As for a shared database this might be a good idea, but I will leave > > that up to application writers to decide, for me a good start would be > > that all Music applications for instance tried hard to get people to > > save their Music under $HOME/Music for instance. That way when you > > start > > another Music application or Elisa you don't need to specify which > > directory to look for Music inn. Similar conventions would be good for > > pictures and movies and album/dvd cover art. > > Just last week I got a bug report and a patch for this in Sound Juicer. > It hard-codes the default location to save files as ~/Music/. Now, my > question is this: do I commit this, or do we need a more powerful system > that handles i18n? I'm sure a Persian GNOME user would not like their > music in ~/Music/. One quick solution is to translate the string > "Music"... is that enough? > > Ross
Hi all, I'm a long time lurker and would like to propose an idea to solve this issue acting at the file_choser level and using a new .desktop file key. Applications should have a X-GNOME-MetaType[*] line in their .desktop file. The list of possible values is well defined: music, image, document, video, archive, project. For example: Rhythmbox -> X-GNOME-MetaType=music OO.o -> X-GNOME-MetaType=document The GIMP -> X-GNOME-MetaType=image EOG -> X-GNOME-MetaType=image FileRoller -> X-GNOME-MetaType=archive Anjuta -> X-GNOME-MetaType=project Then all the magic happens within the file chooser (not the application!); when called, it chooses which folder to show you following this order of preference: 1. the folder which was last used for this operation (opening/saving) in the current application session; 2. the folder intended for this kind of files, if any (e.g. ~/Music/); 3. $HOME Point 2 is the one requiring more discussion. Let's suppose we're the GIMP and have X-GNOME-MetaType=image; then the *file_chooser* should try to find out which is the folder where the user puts his images. At first it looks inside ~/.local/default-dirs/ and sees if it can find a symbolic link named "images". For example: ~/.local/default-dirs/images -> ~/Images. If it can't find it, then it asks the user: ________________________________________________________ |______________________________________________________X_| | | | It is the first time you save an image. Where do you | | want to put this kind of files, by default? | | _______________ | | o | ~/Images | | | '~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~' | | o Nowhere in particular _________ | | | X Close | | | '~~~~~~~~~' | '~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~' The proposed "~/Images" should really be its localized equivalent. The choice "Nowhere in particular" means $HOME. Let's suppose the user changes the proposed default to "~/Graphics"; then a symbolic link is created: ~/.gtk-dirs/images -> ~/Graphics. All this could happen without the app even knowing and would only require changes is .desktop files and in the file chooser. If an application needs more control, a new gobject property called metatype could be added to the file_chooser (containing a value in GTK_METATYPE_MUSIC, GTK_METATYPE_IMAGE, GTK_METATYPE_DOCUMENT, GTK_METATYPE_VIDEO, GTK_METATYPE_ARCHIVE, GTK_METATYPE_PROJECT etc.). This setting would prevail on the one in the .desktop file. PROs: * Not intrusive and easy to implement. * All changes are done at the gtk level (inside the file_chooser); applications remain untouched. * Flexible, since everybody can give the name he wants to his folders. * Doesn't use gconf and could also be proposed to KDE people. * Everything just works whether the user does a "mv ~/Graphics ~/MyPhotos", since the link in .local/default-dirs becomes dangling and the file_chooser shows again its question about the Images dir. (checking for renames through inotify would also be good, of course...) * Command line tools could reach those folders through .local/default-dirs links. * Nautilus could trivially assign an automatic emblem to those special folders. Just my 2 cents. Hi again, robepisc [*] what I call "metatype", here, is not the MIME type, since we don't care if a document is a .rtf, a .doc or a .odf file; what we care is it is a "Document". Note however that the metatype could probably be inferred from the MimeType. So X-GNOME-MetaType could not even be necessary. _______________________________________________ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
