Trash specification

[François Revol]

(sorry Mail.app is too stupid to handle digests as separate mails)

> De : Wei Jiang <_weijiang_ at yahoo.com>
> Date : 21 juin 2010 13:49:55 HAEC

Aw, that's old :)

> À : xdg at lists.freedesktop.org
> Objet : Trash specification
> 
> Hi All,
> 
> The Trash specification is very good. It is intent for Unix, but it is good for Windows as well, with minor modification. 
> 
> I have implemented it for a cross platform (Unix and Windows) file manager Acelet Filer at http://www.acelet.com/desktop/filer.html.
> 
> I would like to comment about the Trash specification from my experience:
> 
> $XDG_DATA_HOME is difficult to implement. 
> It is almost out of the capacity of trash implementer. Maybe I can modify .bashrc to add that environment variable, but the user may delete it later. I have checked Ubuntu 9.40 with Nautilus, $XDG_DATA_HOME is undefined.
> 
> Instead, I would suggest an alternative:
> 
> Call the program, which implements the Trash specification, with option -info homeTrashDirName to get the trash directory name. 

In Haiku just as on BeOS, we have a C/C++ API to get specific directories, find_directory().
There is a finddir command that allows shell scripts to use it.
http://dev.haiku-os.org/browser/haiku/trunk/src/bin/finddir.c

I believe this way is less fragile than having to export env vars, which can be stripped off the env when performing remote login (ssh).

Also, this allows to return a different path depending on the volume/filesystem and even uid.

Typically for trash, it's possible to return the path that correspond to the user for the /home mountpoint, but return the NTFS-specific path for this fs.
This way files can be moved to trash without having to be moved across mountpoints.

François.