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

[Claes Holmerson]

On Thu, 2 Sep 2004, Alexander Larsson wrote:

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

Hmm.. I can't really understand this argument. I thought the XDG Base
directory specification
(http://freedesktop.org/Standards/basedir-spec/basedir-spec-0.6.html) was
supposed to be built upon in other specifications developed at
freedesktop? Are not the environment variables defined there sensitive to
exactly the same problems as you describe here? I also thought that these
variables were supposed to be set at login, independent of the desktop
that is used, so it is not like they should be changed all the time...

Claes