On Mi, 02.05.18 17:44, Nicolas Mailhot (nicolas.mailhot@xxxxxxxxxxx) wrote: > Le 2018-05-02 16:53, Paul Wouters a écrit : > > > So I don't think your "User explicitly installed SW into his home > > directory" is true, and it is especially not true if software can > > make use of knowing ~/.bin will be there for it to quietly drop some > > things in. > > The XDG spec and its insistence on mediating all accesses via env variables > that themselves (by default) point to hidden directories has always been a > trainwreck. All the more so since the main justification for this choice was > to allow localized directory names in desktop icons that were supposed to be > sourced from ~/ except it was quickly superseded by ~/Desktop (in > English!), You are mixing up xdg-basedir and xdg-user-dir: https://standards.freedesktop.org/basedir-spec/basedir-spec-latest.html vs. https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/xdg-user-dirs/ > many apps could never have dealt with the codepoints required by some human > languages, and the whole thing was finally dumped overboard by GNOME anyway. > After many years many apps have still not learned to read those env vars, or > hardcode their default value, or whatever. It's massively over-engineered, > under-used, opaque to users and so on. The basedir stuff doesn't bother with l10n at all, only xdg-user-dirs does. And to my knowledge gnome still very much uses xdg-user-dirs, at least if I open nautilus I still see all the xdg-user-dirs defined dirs on the left... > It badly needs to be rewritten without hidden dotdirs, without positing apps > that by and large rely on hardcoded default values or config files find > suddenly convenient to read env vars all the times just in case someone > deemed smart to rename default dir names to something else (the legacy XDG > envs vars could then point to the new dir hierarchy for the apps that bother > reading them), in fact, without positing that part of the *nix directory > hierarchy has a specific renaming behavior when the rest is fixed in stone > (that's too much schizophrenia for the average *nix app writer). the xdg-basedir focusses on system level stuff, i.e. libraries, data, binaries and suchlike. the xdg-userdir stuff focusses on user-facing stuff, i.e. documents, music, videos, and so on. That's why the former places stuff in ~/.local, away from the user's view, while the latter places stuff in localized directories with no dot prefix, as they should be visible directly. I mean, I was involved in one of the two specs, hence I am of course biased, but even if the specs turned out not to be perfect after 15years of use, definitely a lot of thought went into them. And what's "perfect" anyway? Lennart -- Lennart Poettering, Red Hat _______________________________________________ devel mailing list -- devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe send an email to devel-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
