Right now disk icons are named as follows:

"Root" for the root directory, and the file name of the mount directory (but not
the full path name) for everything else.

This is confusing for the following reasons:

* "Root" might be mistaken for "/root", root's home directory, rather than "/"
(in fact I briefly mistook it for this). 

* Other parts of the Nautilus UI consistently refer to the root directory as
"/", not "Root" (this includes the tree view, and the sidebar, title and
location bar

* "Root" is not going to be any more clear to the end user than "/", users don't
think of the fact that their filesystem has a "root".

* the non-full-path naming can be ambiguous. For instance, I have both "/home"
and "/usr/local/home" on my machine. I happen to know that the rule is that disk
icons show up only for things that are partitions, but this may not be clear to
the beginning user. I have also had machines where both "/home" and
"/usr/local/home" were both paritions, and this would have made me end up with
two icons named "home" on my desktop, which would be pretty useless.

I propose the following rule instead: For every disk icon (both root and
non-root), use the full path as the label. So the root would be "/", home would
be "/home", my hypothetical second home would be "/usr/local/home", etc.

This is definitely what I'd want to see in "expert" mode. If we come up with
some better naming for "beginner", we probably want to make sure it doesn't lead
to the kind of collisions or inconsistency with other parts of Nautilus that the
current scheme does (i.e. if we rename the icon for the root directory in
beginner mode to "Root" or "My Computer" or whatever, we should do the same in
the tree view, the nautilus sidebar, and maybe even the location bar (????)).



------- Additional Comments From sullivan@eazel.com 2000-12-22 20:32:16 ----

I agree with Maciej on everything he says here. The only name I've come 
up with for "/" that makes any sense to me is "local storage". I don't 
actually think it's better overall than just "/" though. I strongly agree that we 
shouldn't special-case the name on the desktop for this location -- if we 
call it "/" everywhere else we should call it "/" here. If we decide on another 
name we should use that everywhere. But "Root" is bad, as Maciej says, 
because it's a word already used in unix for something related to but 
different than "/", so it could only cause confusion.

I'm not particularly excited about seeing full path names for icons on the 
desktop, but I do think that the possible name conflicts caused by 
showing just the last part of the name are bad enough to rule out that 
design. If the user could change the names, then I think starting with just 
the file name would be fine, since the user could rename any conflicts. 
But currently the user can't change the names, so allowing potentially 
duplicate names seems really bad to me.



------- Additional Comments From gzr@eazel.com 2000-12-22 20:42:08 ----

It is illegal to have "/" in an icon name.



------- Additional Comments From sullivan@eazel.com 2000-12-22 20:47:37 ----

I don't know if Gene's assertion is really correct. We have (deliberately & 
sensibly) made it illegal for the user to rename a file to something 
containing "/", but that doesn't prevent us from displaying a text string 
containing "/" under an icon. It is possibly the case that we'd have to do 
some special-case tomfoolery to get this to work though.



------- Additional Comments From gzr@eazel.com 2000-12-22 20:58:54 ----

I should have written more.  Life will be confusing for the user if there are
icons with / in their names, but they are unable to rename files using / in the
name.




------- Additional Comments From darin@bentspoon.com 2000-12-28 11:06:11 ----

Setting to P6/PR3 so Don can set the priority/milestone.



------- Additional Comments From don@eazel.com 2000-12-28 13:11:16 ----

Let's resolve this for PR3.  It's a highly visible portion of the UI.  Let's get
it right.  Or at least not grotesquely wrong. ;)

I don't like "Root" either.  And like John, I believe that using a "/" is the
best option for now.  Does anyone have a better idea?




------- Additional Comments From gzr@eazel.com 2000-12-30 14:51:22 ----

I hate this bug. Arlo, tell me what to do.  I wish someone would take some
responsibility for this.



------- Additional Comments From gzr@eazel.com 2001-01-02 10:17:50 ----

I would like to add that if the best we can do is to name the icon "/" we 
should just not show any mounts on the desktop until we have a real strategy on 
how to handle these issues.  It was my perception that Nautilus was going to 
make linux easier to use.  It is true that we are exposing the "/" symbol all 
over the UI. This is a huge mistake in my opinion.  Instead of deciding what 
the best option is for now, let's decide what the best option is.  Let's take 
the time to do it right.  If these means that mounts will not show up on the 
desktop, or that the desktop serves no practical use for 1.0, let's not use the 
desktop for 1.0.  It is most likely true that early adopting Unix lovers will 
have no use for the desktop.





------- Additional Comments From arlo@workthatmouse.com 2001-01-02 10:38:49 ----

While I agree that exposing mounts is probably not a good thing to do 'till 
we can get it right, I don't agree that we shouldn't give them a desktop for 
1.0.   I don't see how these two are related.



------- Additional Comments From don@eazel.com 2001-01-02 13:27:57 ----

OK, Wednesday Jan 3, at 2 before the client meeting, the four of us (me, Gene,
John, and Arlo) will huddle in my cube and make a decision on this once and for
all.




------- Additional Comments From gzr@eazel.com 2001-01-03 15:32:15 ----

Please see new bug 45412.



------- Additional Comments From eli@eazel.com 2001-01-07 22:09:44 ----

I suggest that I am extraordinarily unlikely to have anything useful to say
here  that wouldn't have been mentioned in 2.5 pages and a meeting by John
Sullivan, Arlo Rose, Don Melton, Gene Ragan, and Maciej.

Therefore, I am rubber-stamping this bug as Verified/invalid without inspection
and will trust your decision.



------- Bug moved to this database by unknown@bugzilla.gnome.org 2001-09-09 20:48 -------