User directories integration - request for help

[Nicolas Mailhot]

Le Lun 19 mars 2007 10:42, Alexander Larsson a écrit :
> On Sat, 2007-03-17 at 22:03 +0200, Baris Cicek wrote:
>> I could not find where to post this, so sending over here.
>>
>> I changed Alex's xdg-user-dirs application to make it using symlinks
>> instead of actual directories. Maybe it's something in vain but just
>> wanted to put my solution into a prototype so as to be tested. (Maybe
>> someone like it).
>>
>> Actually using symlinks give better handling of localization than using
>> --force. It does not touch directories, so can be considered
>> theoretically more secure.
>
> Each application will have to use readlink() to find the actual
> directory to use. For sure you don't want have a filename like
> ~/.desktop/file.txt to ever be seen by the user, so you must always
> store the expanded form. Plus, you need to fallback on a file if
> symlinks are not supported.

And all this can be put in a nice common GUI library. OTOH all the unix
utilities that work on a file (including symlinks) won't learn to parse
your special file. Shell wrappers will multiply (getting parsing of this
file wrong most often than not)

> So, I don't think this is a better solution. (As I didn't when it was
> proposed in the discussions leading to the design of xdg-user-dirs.)

And I can (and do) disagree with you

-- 
Nicolas Mailhot