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

[Alexander Larsson]

On Wed, 2004-09-01 at 17:01 +0200, Claes Holmerson wrote:
> 
> 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.

I'm worried that any use of env variables like this will cause you to
sometimes use different trash directories (depending on what desktop you
logged in to, what computer you used, and things like that). This means
you will:
a) Not be able to recover some trash from a previous login
b) Not be able to free up space from a previous login if the disk is
full or out of quota

This is why having a configurable trash dir strikes me as bad. The spec
i all about making us SHARE the trash directory for various good
reasons. Adding an env variable makes this easy to break.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
 Alexander Larsson                                            Red Hat, Inc 
                   alexl at redhat.com    alla at lysator.liu.se 
He's an impetuous amnesiac matador on his last day in the job. She's a 
green-fingered out-of-work research scientist operating on the wrong side of 
the law. They fight crime!