On May 31, 2006, at 2:24 PM, Michal Suchanek wrote:

> On 5/31/06, Mat Schaffer <schapht / gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> On May 31, 2006, at 12:06 PM, Gregory Brown wrote:
>>
>> > On 5/29/06, Dave Burt <dave / burt.id.au> wrote:
>> >> Curt Hibbs wrote:
>> >> > We'll add an alert dialog telling you that the entire dircetory
>> >> will be
>> >> > deleted and giving you the option to proceed or abort.
>> >>
>> >> FWIW, I far prefer this proposal to the alternative of _not_  
>> deleting
>> >> the whole installation directory.
>> >
>> > I think that might get mucky, since the directory structure might
>> > change from release to release and things like that.
>> >
>> > My employer always sticks ruby scripts I write for him in with the
>> > ruby distribution.  This drives me bonkers, I have no idea why  
>> he does
>> > this.
>> >
>> > Is this common practice on Windows?  I'd prefer to leave my code  
>> OUT
>> > of places where it can get mixed in with an active distribution.  I
>> > don't know, maybe it's just an
>> > (only-uses-windows-when-absolutely-necessary) type coders point of
>> > view, but sliding my scripts into C:\ruby seems to be begging for
>> > problems.
>>
>> I think it comes from the fairly useless "home" directories on
>> windows (and Mac OS actually).  You have My Documents (Documents on
>> Mac), but almost every program tries to stick stuff in there it
>> shouldn't.  So I find people try to avoid it cause they don't know
>> what half of it is.
>
> What is useless about ~ on OS X? You can stuff everything in there
> just like any other *IX. And you get a nice shourtcut for ~ in the GUI
> apps so there is no problem. And when you get hundreds of files in
> there you can always find them as long as you got some idea what the
> name was like :)
>
> On Windows ~ is set to the profile directory which is not as nicely
> accessible from the GUI. You can use desktop (or Documents) for
> storing stuff. But admittedly Windows users are homeless :)
>
> Thanks
>
> Michal

I wasn't talking about ~, I'm talking about "~/Documents".  Which  
would be a great idea if various software packages didn't put stuff  
in it that should go in Library or elsewhere (e.g., Adobe CS, Office,  
Virtual PC, Konfabulator)  Don't get me wrong, I don't blame OS X,  
I'm just saying the same problem of polluted "*Documents" directories  
exists on both platforms.  ~ on the other hand is left relatively  
clean on OS X, and the ~ equivalent on Windows (last I checked) warns  
you about using it if you try to browse to it which is pretty  
prohibitive.  Either way, we're both right.  Isn't that grand.
-Mat