[PROPOSAL] Desktop Bookmarks

[Emmanuele Bassi]

On Tue, 2005-05-10 at 20:31 +0200, David Faure wrote:

> I like http://devel.emmanuelebassi.net/papers/bookmark-spec.html because
> it makes it possible to reuse bookmarks code for handling recent files.
> 
> I don't get why it wants to store them into ~/.bookmarks though, if this
> isn't about the main (web) bookmarks collection but only about local-file-browsing?
> It gets confusing if people assume the web bookmarks (usually called just "bookmarks"
> will be there).

The file name could be changed to '.local-bookmarks', but since in could
store non-local bookmarks, I'd say that '.desktop-bookmarks' would be
more to the point.

> "Replace the Recent Files Storage Specification, providing a single specification for both bookmarks and recent files"
> sounds good, but both files should still be separated. There's a difference between
> a set of bookmarks that the user has set himself, and the "recent files" list that is
> automatically updated.

The desktop bookmarks list itself could be automatically updated:
suppose you set a bookmark to a location on a volume, and you do not
access it for more than six months; the system could selectively remove
older entries (where "older" means "older than a limit conveniently
choosen by fd.o or set by the user").  This could avoid unnecessary
clutter.

> So there should be a local-bookmarks and a recent-files file that use that spec.
> And I guess $HOME itself isn't the best location when XDG already defines
> the proper dirs for such things (but I don't remember the details of that speotc
> to suggest something concrete).

The basedir-spec defines ${XDG_DATA_HOME}, so we could put the bookmarks
file under ${XDG_DATA_HOME}/desktop-bookmarks.

We could also place system-wide bookmarks, like the ones pointing to the
user's home, to the trash directory and such standard locations, under
$(datadir)/desktop-bookmarks.

Kind regards,
 Emmanuele.

-- 
Emmanuele Bassi <ebassi at gmail.com>
Web site: http://log.emmanuelebassi.net