Thumnail & Icon specs

[Malcolm Tredinnick]

On Thu, 2003-07-31 at 01:55, Craig Drummond wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I’m new to this list, so I apologise if I’m already bringing up a known
> issue - I've looked at the archives for a few months back, and can't find
> anything...
> 
> Whilst reading the specs at www.freedesktop.org, I came across the Thumbnail
> and Icon specs. These specify that thumbnails should be stored in
> $HOME/.thumbnails and icons in $HOME/.icons. Would it not be better to store these in
> $XDG_DATA_HOME/thumbnails and $XDG_DATA_HOME/icons respectively? Littering
> $HOME with lots of hidden folders is very annoying, and in this instance seems
> quite pointless.
> 
> Another culprit is fontconfig - where the default user fonts dir is
> $HOME/.fonts. Again, would it not be better if this was changed to use
> $XDG_DATA_HOME/fonts?

One reason is that the user cannot necessarily write to $XDG_DATA_HOME,
whereas they can obviously write to $HOME. Thus, the specs allow users
to install their own icons, thumbnails and fonts and to clean them out
themselves.

Cheers,
Malcolm