XDG Base Directory Spec

[James Richard Tyrer]

Andrew Sobala wrote:
> On Sun, 2004-02-08 at 19:35, Lee Willis wrote:
> 
>>There was some discussion recently on the Muine[1] development list
>>about standard locations for files for a user, much like windows has "My
>>Documents/My Music", and "My Document/My Pictures". The closest I can
>>find to anything representing this would be the Basedir spec -
>>http://freedesktop.org/Standards/basedir-spec/0.6/.
>>
>>This doesn't however go as far as I think would be useful in the case we
>>were originally considering, specifically the creation of standard
>>directories for:
>>
>>- Music storage
>>- Playlist storage
>>
>>These could then be used as the default import location for music
>>players, the default save path by music rippers, and per mime-type
>>default save locations when downloading content in browsers etc.
>>
>>The thread which originally sparked this off was on the muine list at
>>http://mail.gnome.org/archives/muine-list/2004-February/msg00046.html.
>>
>>I'd be interested in any feedback that anyone of this list has,
>>particularly about whether this is a good idea, and how the
>>implementation might work.
> 
> 
> This has been hashed out on GNOME mailing lists before. The big problem
> is that directory names aren't localisable, so promoting that as a
> "standard" is a problem for users of different locales.
> 
> Since we don't have a localisable file system (crack alert!), I think
> this sort of thing should be globally desktop configurable in some way
> rather than having a static default. How to do this, I'm not sure.
> 
The actual directory is going to have to have the same name in all locales.
  Otherwise, how would applications deal with them?

However if these directories are in their own directory -- I call this:
"USR-Home" on my system because I use the environment variable: "USR_HOME"
to point to it -- and each one has a icon on the desktop, the 'desktop'
file can have the translations in it.

--
JRT