elektrainitiative / book Goto Github PK

2018-01-22 15:00 Avi Alkalay wrote:

In the history, Elektra was not sponsored by IBM, it was my personal
project.
Then somebody from the KDE community noticed the project and talked
about it to a guy from IBM who knew me.
IBM saw this as an opportunity to participate on a KDE event in Germany,
so IBM payed for my travel expenses. Thats all.

This is my pet peef which haunts me almost every day when I'm looking for PDF files on the Internets... Finally now I decided to blow off my surplus pressure. Sorry if it hits YOU only for now (many others would also deserve it), and sorry if you feel innocent.

I don't know how often it happened in my early internet life that I downloaded a PDF, DOC, XLX or other document only to find that the download had simply overwritten another, completely un-related file. It must have been more than a dozen times. Took some time to make it a habit to check for the filename, and then decide about new one on the fly before saving it to disk.

C'mon, people! Characters are free. Bytes to store longer, meaningful file names are almost free. File systems no longer suffer from a 8+3 limitation. You could easily use document filenames which are self-describing about their content, their publisher, the version, language and release date of the ouvre.

Why use "report.doc", "table.xlx", "notes.txt", "movie.mp4", "test.config" or "book.pdf" for ANYTHING that someone releases upon humanity or that you keep on your local disk privately? Are you just too lazy? Don't you think about how your laziness causes you more work later, because you can't tell your own "myfile.ext" from your sister's "myfile.ext"? Don't you have any thoughts for your neighbourly hackers who want clearly distinct names for the files they have to handle?

Don't you want your publication be RECOGNIZED by search engines, or humans browsing websites, or bots scanning through file systems? Filenames are the most obvious and easy to use ELEMENTARY metadata which COULD be made use of....

Have you ever wondered why in shops of all types the products are not labelled the same way, and don't use the same cardbox types, material and color, so every time you want to buy something you'd have to look inside many packagings first before you find what you look for? And at home, of course, you'd be clever enough to stock the stuff in clearly distinguishable containers, after un-packing your shop lootings...

So, please, think of a better name than "book.pdf". How about something simple, like "electra-book-2017-december-markus-raab.pdf"? Let me know if you don't have enough storage for these extra letters. I'll shed some tears then...

How can I even start off with even the most basic trust in the sanity and thoughtfulness of elektra developers if the first thing I encounter when looking at their project is such a stupidly careless naming for something which may be THE showcase document about their efforts???