KDE 3.3 About to Finish: Public Release Candidate 2

Yes, but switching to UTF-8 is a big problem in itself. Moreover, last time I checked, there wasn't any widespread mechanism in place in Linux (which is a pretty major platform for KDE, after all) to force users to actually use UTF-8 when naming files - to the kernel and most filesystems, filenames are just byte strings and users can choose different locales and blast in character combinations which are illegal in UTF-8 but which look alright in each user's own chosen character encoding.

It's a nasty situation, but significant projects like KDE should be putting pressure on the Linux people (amongst others) to fix the insanity.

>Pågen, Åkerman and so forth show very effectively how important the å is in names, they just write a for their international products.

It is possible to just use A instead of Å but this transforms a name with a meaning as in your examples to just names (without meaning). Another example of this is the Swedish company “Skånska cementgjuteriet” (meaning Scanian cement foundry) changing their name to the internationally more useful name “Skanska” (without any meaning). But this in not very useful when the most important thing you want to preserve is the meaning of the word, as in a filename. Otherwise all files could be known only by the inode number.

>This is the strategie I know also from my girlfriend. Theoretically it would be possible to write ao and oe instead of å and ö. Which probably is also the way these letters were constructed some years ago, any calligrapher around?

If you by “some years” refer to the 14th century you are correct. :)
It is possible to use aa, ae and oe to transcribe Swedish text. This is however neither used nor easily understood by normal people. Remember that it has to be practical for the average user.

>Personnally, I insist on being able to use special caracters (for simplicitys sake called umlauts before) in normal text, but we are talking about filenames here. I have big difficulties to show any comprehension to people wanting spaces and special caracters in their filenames. This searching for trouble.

I would not call it special characters, as they are not more special than, say g is, to a Swede. When talking about special characters you adopt a nationality. To a Swede W could be considered a special character as it is only used in foreign words and names.

When saving a document in MS word, the save dialogue box will default to a name consisting of the first words from the text. This suggested name often describes the document fairly well and most users use this as the filename with minor changes (and, yes I know this is to ask for trouble when moving the file between different OS:s, but not for that user on his own system). As a grad student I used to be responsible for the computers in my research department, mainly consisting of windows computers (95 to 2000) with some Macs (Os 8 to X) and linux servers. The working language for everybody was English. Most people however preferred to give files names that made the files easily found and identified. A longer name consisting of several words in the users native language fulfils those demands. Over the years the interchange of files went progressively smoother, not as a result of me constantly preaching the gospel of “English file-names without spaces”, but as a result of improved interoperability of the computer systems.

The point of this is:
It is much easier to make the computers adapt a naming scheme that is comprehensible for normal people than to constantly re-educate people to the ever changing capabilities of computers. I know of the problems in doing so, but it has to be done sooner or later.

I often use fish or sftp to access DNA-sequence files saved from a dedicated Mac Os9 sequencing computer on a Win2000-server through an smb-mount on my linux-server to my kde laptop, which I work on through a cygwin X-server on my windows XP workstation. Well, it is not optimal but this is the way it is in many universities and the KDE end of it usually works like a dream.

It is however very difficult for me to make the rest of the department adjust to my “safer and superior” file-naming scheme, when their intuitive and simple method of just describing the file (meaning, not name) in Swedish works perfectly for them on their computers.

Best regards
/Olle.

KDE 3.3.1 will be rather released 6 weeks, not months, after KDE 3.3.

40 konsoles later...
Oh damn man. havent known that. bad thing *g*

xterm loads faster than the keyboard repeat rate. Konsole takes a few seconds.

> Did you ever search for "F4"?

I wouldn't do that, "Konqueror open terminal" seems to more appropriate.

> Also we have better things to do, than to forward _all_ bugs Gentoo users find.

And the KDE developers have better things to do than to scan the mailing lists of all distributions for descriptions of possible KDE bugs. If you don't care to report it then don't moan that it stays unfixed!