XDG Base Directory Spec

[David Faure]

On Tuesday 10 February 2004 22:17, James Richard Tyrer wrote:
> David Faure wrote:
> > On Tuesday 10 February 2004 06:05, James Richard Tyrer wrote:
> > 
> >>The actual directory is going to have to have the same name in all locales.
> >>  Otherwise, how would applications deal with them?
> > 
> > By looking it up in a config file?
> 
> Yes an application could do that.  We could also use an environment
> variable for each of the.

It's easier to change things at runtime if it's a config file (well you need
to tell the apps about the change, but DBUS can help there).
Not that it will happen often, but if you have a configuration module
with a GUI to change those paths, this needs to be handled properly.

> > (that's what we do in KDE for the location of the Desktop, the Trash, the 
> > Documents folder and the Autostart folder). I think the same can be done 
> > for any user-visible folder we might want to define.
> 
> Yes, but these are internal KDE functions not directly accessed by third
> party applications.

Sure, but my proposal is to put those paths in a new, desktop-neutral location,
say ~/.local/config/paths or whatever the spec for config dirs is.

> The problem is still that an application might ignore this 
That would be a bug then.
> and simply use the English name for the folder. 
Which English name? This isn't about any English name, it's about looking up
the configured path for something.

> This would cause problems.  For this to 
> work, it should be setup so that third party applications are not aware of
> the actual folder or its location -- they should just 'think' that they are
> using $HOME but the DeskTop is directing them to a different folder.  Is
> this possible?
I don't see how. If they use $HOME, they'll go to $HOME.

-- 
David Faure, faure at kde.org, sponsored by Trolltech to work on KDE,
Konqueror (http://www.konqueror.org), and KOffice (http://www.koffice.org).