Re: Configuration masquerading Data

Nice thoughts, really nice thoughts!

But I have to defend cheese! You're right, storing the pictures in a 
hidden directory is not that good! The maintainer of cheese, daniel 
siegel implemented it this way, because he thought storing all these 
random-crazy-looking-pictures taken with cheese in the photo directory 
makes more than a mess!

Anyway, we have changed that already in the latest version (which will 
be released with gnome 2.24 on Sept. 24)! Now the pictures and videos 
are stored either in a user-defined path (at the moment its only a gconf 
option, but it could be part of a preferences dialog too in future...) 
or in the standard xdg folder [1], for example /home/foo/Videos/Webcam 
(if the gconf option is not set)!

So, try out the new cheese and tell us if you like it ;)

Best Regards, Felix Kaser

[1] http://standards.freedesktop.org/basedir-spec/basedir-spec-0.6.html

Martin Owens schrieb:
> Dear Ubuntu and Evolution Developers,
>
> I'm sending this email to the gnome evolution hackers list to see what
> their thoughts are.
>   
> I have noticed a really odd disconnect in gnu/linux with user data
> which has me a little worried. Some user data is hidden from users in
> configuration directories.
>
> Technically configuration directories denoted by being hidden
> (suffexed with a '.') are there to hold collections of configuration
> files for the applications which they serve. But there are plenty of
> programs using these directories to store the data results as well as
> configuration.
>
> For consideration I present Cheese, a very nice tool for using
> web-cams to take photos with weird disfiguring effects. The problem as
> I see it is that Cheese stores each of the photos in it's ~/.cheese
> directory which makes them hidden from the user. Instead I propose
> that Cheese use a standard directory (possibly configurable) such as
> ~/Photographs/Cheese or ~/Documents/Cheese which is accessible to user
> browsing.
>
> Cheese is an excellent example of making user data more accessible to
> casual file browsing which is not just limited to jpeg images but
> could just as easily apply to the way Evolution stores emails,
> addresses, contacts and so on. In these instances the data is always
> bound up in evolution specific formats inaccessible to casual browsing
> as well as casual integration (without delving into the EDS API)
>
> I'd like data to be available to send in an email, or browse in
> nautilus (or on a command line) I'd like to be able to open the same
> jpeg in image viewer and gimp, not just in what ever created or
> generated them. I'd like to be able to open addresses and copy an
> event file to my thumb drive. Wouldn't it be good to backup all your
> files without configs and be sure your not missing emails or
> bookmarks?
>
> In fact the methods we use to store data seems to be along the same
> lines that certain Windows and Mac programs use to obfuscate and hide
> data in order to lock users into their products. Do we really need to
> do this on our gnu/linux systems? Should we instead intend user data
> to be converted with plugins and export features in every application
> because of their hidden default outputs?
>
> This issue may be interesting to the FDO (freedesktop.org) crowd. It
> is a very heavy topic that will probably get me a little flaming
> because it goes against what is currently best practice.
>
> Best Regards, Martin Owens
> _______________________________________________
> Cheese-list mailing list
> [email protected]
> http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/cheese-list
>
>