storage location for common user directories

[Joerg Barfurth]

Jamie McCracken schrieb:
> Benjamin Meyer wrote:
>> I am curious if anyone has through about making a storage location 
>> standard for user directories.  More generic then Trash there are a 
>> handfull of directories that would be usefull to know such as: 
>> Desktop, Documents, Applications, Music, Movies, and Pictures.
>>

> IIRC, this was discussed a year ago or so on the gnome-dev lists. Other 
> folders were specified too like Downloads and Templates.
> 

There are lots of candidates for this.

> The conclusion was we would not hardcode the paths of the directories 
> because of language translations, 

I don't think translating the physical names of the directories is a 
good idea. It causes all sorts of problems when people access their home 
directory using different locales. Will they end up with multiple 
instances of the same data? Or with a mixed-language UI?

> whether to have them in $Home or 
> $Desktop, making them configurable so Documents could point to a shared 
> folder on a server etc
> 

Configurability (per distro, system or user) can also cause problems. 
But if there are political obstacles to achieving consensus, we probably 
won't get around it.

> I believe the best solution was to have environment variables to get the 
> paths for each respective folder so anybody could configure how they like.
> 

I think an API for retrieving folder names (physical and display) is far 
superior for this. All of MacOS, Mac OSX and MS Windows have this.


Ciao, Joerg

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Joerg Barfurth           phone: +49 40 23646662 / x66662
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