Location of home trash dir (Re: Trash spec 0.2, technical questions)

Claes Holmerson claes at it-slav.net
Wed Sep 1 18:01:42 EEST 2004



On Wed, 1 Sep 2004, David Faure wrote:

> On Monday 30 August 2004 14:11, Jaap Karssenberg wrote:
> > On 30 Aug 2004 13:51:55 +0200 Alexander Larsson wrote:
> > : On Mon, 2004-08-30 at 12:36, Jaap Karssenberg wrote:
> > : > On Mon, 30 Aug 2004 13:04:38 +0400 Mikhail Ramendik wrote:
> > : > : Version 0.2 of the Trash Spec is now available. The location is
> > : > : unchanged:
> > : > :
> > : > : http://www.ramendik.ru/docs/trashspec.html
> > : >
> > : > Why not have a environment variable to specify the users trash dir ?
> > : > Say I would like to use $HOME/Trash instead of $HOME/.Trash I would
> > : > like to be able to set a variable for this. How about $TRASHDIR or
> > : > (to be coherent with the basedir spec) $XDG_TRASH_HOME ?
> > :
> > : As an opposing view. Why have an environment variable to specify this?
> > : Just adding complexity for the sake of complexity is very bad.
> >
> > Because being able to organise your "hidden" directories reduces
> > complexity instead of increasing it. At this moment I have 146 hidden
> > directories in my home directory that I can't move to a more organised
> > structure which makes browsing my home dir very bad for some
> > applications. This is why the basedir specification tries to create
> > order in this realm.
>
> I'm fine with an env. var, even though it sounds like a way for the user to shoot
> himself in the foot :)
> But the amount of hidden files in your $HOME isn't going to be helped much by
> this, every single X application writes stuff there... The worse of them all
> being zsh, which leaves tons of history files in my $HOME :)
>

Would it not make sense to define the trash directory relative to
$XDG_CACHE_HOME? Trash, as well as cached data, is something you normally
don't want to back up, and it is also something you might want to remove
when lacking space, as well as to clean up your "history" for privacy
reasons and similar. I think it makes sense to put such things below a
common base directory.

Claes



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