Freedesktop "Recent File Storage Specification" broken by concept - what's the correct way to fix it?

[Emmanuele Bassi]

Hi;

On Thu, 3 Sep 2020 at 14:47, Stefan Blachmann <sblachmann at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi!
>
> All DMs and OSes (Windows, MacOS) provide a menu for recently used files.
> The freedesktop "Recent File Storage Specification" was probably
> intended as an unified means to provide freedesktop software users
> with access to recently used files via a start menu.
> The specification is here:
>
> https://specifications.freedesktop.org/recent-file-spec/recent-file-spec-0.2.html
>

I'd like to point out that GTK (and GNOME) do not use this specification at
all, which was actually replaced by this one:

https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Specifications/desktop-bookmark-spec/

Which, to be honest, has its own issues, like the use of XBEL instead of a
decent serialisation format that specifies sorting; or the ability to merge
multiple file sources, to deal with sandboxed applications; the fact that
there's no well defined mechanism for sorting, filtering, and expiration of
entries.

Nevertheless, the desktop-boomark specification is an improvement on the
old recent-files specification, and GNOME has been using it for nearly 15
years. It's also not really a "proprietary" solution, considering that it's
listed on the freedesktop website; it was just never promoted as the actual
specification, and left as a "draft" because of the general state of
disrepair of the fd.o infrastructure.

Ciao,
 Emmanuele.

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