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List:       kde-look
Subject:    Re: Again - UI
From:       Phil Rackus <srackus () home ! com>
Date:       2000-04-19 23:21:35
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Ideally the user shouldn't *have* to care about the file system.  The key word is \
ideally.  In an ideal world, hard drives wouldn't crash, partitions would be \
infinately large and no one would ever have cause to re-install their system.

It is good practise to strive to an ideal, but it  is important to make sure that \
your solution is practical in todays non-ideal world.

Imagine you need to re-install your primary partition (for whatever reason), but you \
have 5GB of files that you need to save somewhere.  Without any idea of which \
partition is which  or even if it is local or networked, it could be challenging to \
put your files in a 'safe' location for backup.

Perhaps the goal (for now) should be to make all filesystems (remote, local etc) \
*behave* like a local filesystem, while still making all the information available to \
the user.

Phil

Tomas Furmonavicius wrote:

> On Wed, Apr 19, 2000 at 04:22:12PM -0400, Philip Rackus wrote:
> > 
> > That's a totally elitest comment.  I would expect to hear something like that on \
> > /. but not on group that has defined its mandate as "In short: KDE will bring \
> > UNIX to the desktop! " (straight from the KDE FAQ) Note that it doesn't say bring \
> > UNIX to the desktops of power users only. Besides I didn't suggest that the Unix \
> > filesystem be changed - Just the representation of that filesystem be a little \
> > easier to understand from the new user point of view.
> 
> I'm sorry if my words sounded rude - my english is not too good.
> Anyway I expressed only my opinion, as I'm not a member of KDE project.
> 
> Imagine networked workstation where some filesystems are local, some
> are mounted from network. Why should user care that his home directory
> is physically located on some remote server, or workstation's /tmp
> filesystem is on MFS? Should we create some "Filesystem Neighborhood"
> in the style of Windows's "Network Neighborhood"?
> 
> I can't see why Unix directory structure is hard to understand ?
> When user starts using DOS/Windows he must learn, that floppy drive is
> A: or B:, hard drive partitions are C:, D: ... Why it's OK to expect
> user to know and understand DOS disk naming scheme, and it's not OK to
> expect user not to care too much about Unix filesystems, managed by
> administrators, not users?
> 
> Tomas


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