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List:       kde-devel
Subject:    Re: Problem with kfm unifying dirs
From:       Sven Radej <sven () lisa ! exp ! univie ! ac ! at>
Date:       1999-04-16 15:53:42
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On Fri, 16 Apr 1999, Waldo Bastian wrote:
>Mathias Kettner wrote:
>> 
>> kfm has a behaviour that is intended to be user friendly:
>> 
>> If you select file:/opt/kde/share/applnk/, what you see is a kind of
>> unification of /opt/kde/share/applnk/ and ~/.kde/share/applnk. System-
>> and Userinstalled icons are mixed up. On the first view, everything
>> seems to be nice for the user, but the Idea of showing two directories
>> in one window is very confusing.
>
That's aknown bug report - It is late before 1.1.1 release so I am afraid to
dig too deep. And simple solution isn't clear to me now.

So what am I talking here is about KDE-2 ant this idea.

 >The problem here is that two concepts have been mixed without making
>this
>clear:
>
>Concept 1. KFM is a file system browser.
>
>Concept 2. KFM acts as an application link editor when in the
>application link directory.
>
>Perhaps we could take away some of the confusion by introducing a new
>URL
>"Applications:". If selected KFM shows the two merged directories. 
>If one of the two directories are selected, KFM just shows the files in
>it
>as.. well.. files.

This is for all kde-system files whichare duplicated in local/global manner.
When I say items I mean icons/kdelnks or whatever. When I say "user's dir" I
mean ~/.kde/share/applnk (or ~/.kde/.../icons). When I say "global dirs" I
refer to $KDEDIR/share/applnk.

 This is idea I had and still have in mind:

User doesn't have to know that there are global items and local items. We the
KDE, give some defaults int global dirs; root can administer them. If user
wants to change something (icon, applnk, mimelnk...) this change goes into his
local directory. This works now with mime/applnks in kfm: try Edit applnks and
change any of them as user - the changed item is copied int your local dir
(unless you're root)

This is the way to go further (smallprint: IMHO); 

We should have kpanel start menu behaving like this: discard duplicates in
global dirs, user's dirs have priority.

However the present method for that is ugly hack. So I would like to make
things more general:

Allow users to use this feature as they wish:
A directory "containing" files from different directories; such directory would
have .directory with new entires, like this:

[Multiple View]
preparse=<dir1>,<dir2>,<dir3>
postparse=<dir4>,<dir5>
ignoredups=true

So, "preparse" is a list of dirs scanned (ant contents of which are
shown)  before current directory is shown. "postparse" is for dirs which are to
be scanned after that. ignoreDups is true or false depending should we show
duplicate names or not (we could use syntax like kwm: "foo.bar", "foo.bar<2>")

That is what I had in mind. User's dirs would all have 
"postparse=<global variant>". Globals would have "preparse=<user's variant>"
and "ignoredups=true".

Also - sooner or later some Admin will want to have settings for which he
doesn't want to be changable by user. Such kdelnks would have
"IgnoreOverride=true".

Icons refer to original files - in ther true directories. The settings dialog
is responsible for:
- checking if setting is "IgnoreOverride=true" and disabling changing of that
  item (unless you're root)
- copying the setting to local variant and and making change there. Copying
  creating thw whole dirtree is needed. 

Kfm when reading local settings should ignore them if there is a global variant
with "ignoreOverride".

So that is what I had in mind.








>Any other ideas to improve this? Perhaps the Corel people have some good 
>suggestions?
>
>Cheers,
>Waldo
>-- 
>KDE, Making The Future of Computing Available Today       
>http://www.kde.org
--
Sven Radej     radej@kde.org
KDE developer   Visit http://www.kde.org

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