Re: User directories integration - request for help

[Alexander Larsson <alexl redhat com>]

On Sat, 2007-03-17 at 09:46 +0100, Nicolas Mailhot wrote:
> Le samedi 17 mars 2007 à 00:50 -0400, David Zeuthen a écrit :
> > On Sat, 2007-03-17 at 05:35 +0100, Ralf Corsepius wrote:
> > > I say: Alex, Matthias wake up and take off your shades. You are going to
> > > commit something "stupid"!
> > 
> > [...]
> > 
> > > I say: They missed the lack of usefulness, because they are too focused.
> > 
> > So the developers from the desktop projects and the distros (e.g. the
> > people who participate on xdg-list) are all wrong and stupid because
> > they want this feature and you don't? I think we can end this thread...
> 
> The people on xdg-list are not stupid but they are GUI devs and they
> tend to forget a lot of things on a *nix system is not GUI stuff. Remind
> us again how high gnome-terminal piked in mugshot stats?
> 
> Would it be so difficult to use symlinks as directory pointers instead
> of hiding them in yet another config file? That would make cross-user
> scripting so much easier

There are several problems with symlinks. They don't work on all
filesystems (smb homedirs). They easily escape into the user interface
(i.e. you default your fileselector to ~/.user-dirs/desktop and the user
presses "up" and is greeted with some desktop implementation internals).

However, I'm aware that it has to be easy to write script using  these
directores. Thats why I made the config file a shell script so that you
can do:

test -f ${XDG_CONFIG_HOME:-~/.config}/user-dirs.dirs && source ${XDG_CONFIG_HOME:-~/.config}/user-dirs.dirs
echo ${XDG_DESKTOP_DIR:-$HOME/Desktop}
echo ${XDG_DOWNLOAD_DIR:-$HOME}

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
 Alexander Larsson                                            Red Hat, Inc 
                   alexl redhat com    alla lysator liu se 
He's a fiendish ninja inventor on a mission from God. She's an elegant 
impetuous mechanic from a family of eight older brothers. They fight crime!