Questions

[Elsie Hupp]

Obviously, sandboxing everything doesn’t work very well if the operating system doesn’t provide APIs for sharing data. Unfortunately, these APIs tend to be much more developed on mobile than they are on desktop. (For example, smartphones have form autofill within applications, not just the web browser.) For Flatpak, this API is generally known as “Portals”, but these are not as developed or as widely used as the corresponding APIs that predate them on mobile.

Regarding RFCs and the ISO……………… the point of Freedesktop.org/XDG is precisely that, to develop and maintain shared standards. Flatpak is an XDG standard.

Something that isn’t particularly clear to me is how to propose updates and changes to existing standards. Enough of what constitutes `xdg-user-dirs` is the toolset (which is not a standard) that I assume any changes would have to go through implementation in that toolset, rather than just in conversation in this mailing list. This isn’t really a priority for me to work on at the moment, but I would be curious to hear what other people on the mailing list think about how best to approach the limitations of the existing taxonomy.

> On Nov 22, 2021, at 11:56 AM, BARDOT Jérôme <bardot.jerome at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Not agree with all your statement.
> 
> Because it depends of users use case and developpers choices.
> 
> For severals things we already have rfc/iso and more. Also database mostly sql if can have several schema for pure data services (not application metadata) have for mostly identify use cases a best case schema exist and should be used by all application and extend with there own. It’s a pain to try stuff (same functionalities) when software not share data.
> 
> 
> Game the worst case of software industries. Maintain nothings embed instead of using something like "DEFINE". And also the great of the great the missing part of multi users system.
> 
> Game data are just again stupidly store why not using .config .local and more why i m not fucking able to use a file that set my username, my town name, my default keybord layout !!! a simple xml file can do the job and can be easily extends. Why not a save game directory that can be just add to a general backup path ? it can also permit to all game to use the same protocol to managing stuff. And when u  see gaming is now more profitable than video industry i think they can help us to help everybody. The concept can also be use for game assets with a good format migrating system based on some dimension rules. And one asset for ie a bannier or a fancy skin can be use in several games.
> 
> 
> I currently think some stuff need a separation between my stuff, the others stuff i use. I see 3 different cases :
> 
> - only personnal stuff : email, my own writing, passwords, internet bookmark.
> 
> - mixed content (Images = personnal photo + a set of wallpapers )
> 
> - only "not" personal (except the fact data exist or not) like ebooks, torrents file, rss link.
> 
> 
> I always try to have a global approach to systems.
> 
> I know i will have to deep dive inside in stuff like dbus(which is not recommend to be used for security reasons if i remember well) and gvfs.
> 
> I have lot and lot things to learn.  : \
> 
> 
> and remember i m a crooker rules adept http://sl4.org/crocker.html so feel free to improve my knowledge :)
> 
> 
> On 22/11/2021 14:26, Elsie Hupp wrote:
>> Hi Jérôme,
>> 
>> The way I see it, applications only having access to certain things by default is a good security practice. There are ways for applications to access files outside their sandboxes, but they need to get explicit permission from the system (i.e. the user) in order to do so.
>> 
>> The case of ebooks (as well as the case of notes) is similar to the case of email, where for performance and data integrity reasons it may work better for the items and their metadata to be stored in a database rather than in the filesystem. Additionally, items on disk may be a cache of canonical versions stored remotely. Items in the database can then be exposed to the operating system through DBUS or FUSE.
>> 
>> My take on `xdg-user-folders` is that even if the data in them is technically stored elsewhere, in sandboxes or databases, they can still be important as a primary means for the user to interact with their files. A way of reconciling secure, high-performance backends with a user-friendly folder hierarchy is with a virtual filesystem library like GVFS. Unfortunately, GVFS is not easily extensible and not very approachable from a development standpoint.
>> 
>> There does remain the issue of certain items not neatly fitting the existing taxonomy of `xdg-user-folders`, and I do feel like it could be useful to revisit the categories in use in order to make them a bit more comprehensive. Doing so without creating an even worse mess would be a bit of a process, though.
>> 
>> Probably the tidiest approach would be to introduce more generalized synonyms in both the backend and localized frontend names, then let applications use either the original terms or their alternate versions. You would then get things like:
>> 
>> • Images -> Pictures
>> • Audio -> Music
>> 
>> But also the reverse could be useful. As someone who uses both Linux and macOS, something that has repeatedly tripped me up is the fact that Linux has a folder called “Videos”, while macOS has a folder called “Movies”. So in order to catch typos it could be useful to have the more specific synonym also point to the more general one, like:
>> 
>> • Movies -> Videos
>> 
>> And, as you mentioned, there are items that don’t fit even in the more generalized categories, so we could have things like:
>> 
>> • Projects (i.e. Git repositories, but in general this could include any type of media that “belongs” to a specific project rather than a shared “library”)
>> • Reading/Reference (i.e. books, periodicals, and the like)
>> 
>> And, along the lines of “Reading”, there could be a set of synonyms like:
>> 
>> • Writing -> Documents
>> 
>> Obviously these synonym categories have a lot of flaws and holes, so I’m presenting them not as a coherent set but as an assemblage of potential ideas for adapting the existing categories without discarding or breaking them.
>> 
>> With regard to “Games”, though: “Games” can refer to either the applications themselves or their stored data, and saved game data typically isn’t shared with other applications, so Games are kind of the perfect use case for sandboxed per-application data folders.
>> 
>> For the purpose of making per-application data more accessible to end users, I opened several related issues suggesting an extension to GVFS for that purpose:
>> 
>> https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gvfs/-/issues/547
>> https://github.com/flatpak/flatpak/issues/4173
>> 
>> But implementing this is beyond my ability, and it doesn’t seem to be a priority for the GVFS maintainers.
>> 
>> What other thoughts do you have?
>> 
>> Best,
>> Elsie Hupp
>> 
>>> On Nov 22, 2021, at 2:28 AM, BARDOT Jérôme <bardot.jerome at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> 
>>> Thx
>>> 
>>> Yes it is (helpfull). I already know some stuff i just need to make stuff i need works. :)
>>> 
>>> I first come here for some data approch too.
>>> 
>>> Do you think about more data like ebooks that can be great to have ? 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> where each application basically just has its own sandboxed home folder => most stupid thing in the world
>>> 
>>> 
>>> We need an appropriate data security policies tool with an real identity manager.
>>> 
>>> And i currently try to working on a such tool. If people here have ideas feel free to share.
>>> 
>>> 
>>> J.
>>> 
>>> 
>>> On 20/11/2021 20:15, Elsie Hupp wrote:
>>>> Hi Jérôme,
>>>> 
>>>> The Arch Wiki has a pretty good guide to the `xdg-user-dirs` package installed on most Linux distributions:
>>>> 
>>>> https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/XDG_user_directories
>>>> 
>>>> I’ve dug around in the boilerplate code for *looking up* `xdg-user-dirs`, and it basically queries `XDG_FOOBAR_DIR` for `FOOBAR`, so you *should* basically be able to define any custom folder you want. You can check out my pending pull request on `pyxdg` for a version of the code that’s somewhat easier to read than the original C:
>>>> 
>>>> https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xdg/pyxdg/-/merge_requests/13
>>>> 
>>>> The actual Python file:
>>>> 
>>>> https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xdg/pyxdg/-/blob/8fa45fbbe4cd6676b388ca0549f875739301ed21/xdg/UserDirectory.py
>>>> 
>>>> Note that this is a simplified line-by-line translation of `xdg-user-dir-lookup`:
>>>> 
>>>> https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xdg/xdg-user-dirs/-/blob/master/xdg-user-dir-lookup.c
>>>> 
>>>> However, a big part of the functionality behind `xdg-user-dirs` is (a) the basic list is standardized across most Linux distros, and (b) the actual name of the directory is localized into a large number of natural languages.
>>>> 
>>>> The main reason actually that I joined this mailing list was to ask about directories for difficult-to-categorize use cases, like ebooks or podcasts (or code repositories or, yes, games).
>>>> 
>>>> So, hypothetically, yes, you could define your own `xdg-user-dirs`. However, `xdg-user-dirs` is a tool rather than standard, and even if you got a pull request approved for some additional directory, it would probably take years to percolate out through the install base and never actually reach 100% of users. Oh, and you’d also need to get it adopted by both GLib and Qt. (Qt would probably be easier, considering Windows does IIRC have a `My Games` directory, so there’s already a cross-platform precedent.)
>>>> 
>>>> This is to say that if you define your own custom directories in `xdg-user-dirs` in application code, you should always define a fallback. And in some respects `xdg-user-dirs` is kind of falling out of fashion with the rise in Flatpak and Snap for end-user applications, where each application basically just has its own sandboxed home folder, rather than using a shared per-content-type directory, even though Flatpak portals do increasingly support arbitrary locations in userspace.
>>>> 
>>>> Anyway, I hope this is helpful!
>>>> 
>>>> Best,
>>>> Elsie Hupp
>>>> 
>>>>> On Nov 19, 2021, at 3:51 PM, Jérôme Bardot <bardot.jerome at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>> 
>>>>> Hello,
>>>>> 
>>>>> There is a way to to add this own stuff in XDG_CONFIG_HOME/user-dirs.dirs ? I want a XDG_GAMES_DIR=
>>>>> 
>>>>> Also can i access to XDG var from a shell ?
>>>>> 
>>>>> thx
>>>>> 
>>>>> More specifically someone can mentor me to push stuff if needed ?
>>>>>