Unhappy with xdg-user-dirs

Emmanuele Bassi ebassi at gmail.com
Tue Aug 4 07:12:10 PDT 2015


Hi;

On 4 August 2015 at 14:11, Pat Suwalski <pat at suwalski.net> wrote:
>> 2. My primary issue is that the software should not do unexpected
>> things. I didn’t expect that a program would create these folders, and I
>> didn’t expect that it would repurpose existing folders. Especially I
>> didn’t want it to repurpose my existing folders. So what is the problem
>> with informing the user of the changes, and giving him a chance to opt
>> out? This is a very disrespectful behaviour!

There is no change to opt out from: all the XDG user directories do is
provide convenient defaults for applications. If the directories
already exist, they are left alone; if they do not exist, some
application will try to create them, while others may fall back to
other locations, though I'm pretty sure application developers stopped
falling back because it's been seven years and at some point fallback
code paths that are not getting tested are just sources of bugs.

XDG user directories are just configuration settings. They come with
the system, and users can change them if they so choose. What to do
with those settings is entirely up to the applications using them.

> It's not repurposing any folders. These folders may get used as defaults for
> programs that haven't had any other settings specified, but your existing
> programs would continue doing what you expect.

If you don't want to use the default values, because you already set
up your $HOME in a certain way, you can also change the location of
each directory using ~/.config/user-dirs.dirs. This way, you can keep
using your $HOME layout.

Ciao,
 Emmanuele.

-- 
https://www.bassi.io
[@] ebassi [@gmail.com]


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