Re: Kioslave hell

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Re: Kioslave hell
by Leo S on Thursday 26/Oct/2006, @23:22

>> given the average user's difficulty with the unix filesystem,

Not quite. Maybe the average user has difficulty with the cryptic names like /usr and /etc (I know I did) but I don't believe they have difficulty with /home or /media or similarly meaningful paths.

>> discussions of portability

Fair enough. I see that there is some attraction to presenting a consistent path across platforms. I think it is misguided though. Java tried the same thing with their UI and failed miserably. People don't care that a Java program works the same across platforms, they just notice that it works differently than the other programs on their platform.

>> i'm not overly happy with how it works right now, but the "run away! ioslaves!" meme is lacking in appreciation of the whole problem.

I don't fail to appreciate the problem. I'm saying that the solution is completely unusable for even the simplest use cases, and therefore is not a solution at all. As I have said many times, a very very common task is for a user to plug in a camera or usb thumb drive and open a file on it. If they are lucky, it will open in a KDE application that is aware of the media:/ URL and opens it correctly. If they are unlucky, which is often the case, the application will bring up an error, which will be completely incomprehensible to the user.

Kaffeine says something like "Cannot open remote files", and any non-kde app doesn't even have a chance at opening it.

This is not a little inconvenience for users, this is a huge showstopper that will prevent most users from using files on a removable storage device that isn't set up in /etc/fstab. These devices (any usb mass storage device) are becoming ubiquitous because they are so useful, but with a stock KDE it is incredibly hard to do anything useful with them.

I'm not saying ioslaves are bad. Ioslaves rock for resources that are not equivalent to a local path. fish:// if great, man:// is fine, settings:// is fine because they access resources that are otherwise not easily accessed and everything works inside them. media:/ and home:/ are bad, because they are just pointing at a local path on the filesystem, and they break applications which try to work with those files.

Related Links

·   Articles on KDE in Linux Distributions
·   Also by Leo S
·   Contact author

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Re: Kioslave hell
by Michael on Thursday 26/Oct/2006, @23:53

Full ACK!

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