Re: Translations of folder names - two proposals

[Alexander Larsson <alexl redhat com>]

On Sun, 2004-12-12 at 11:26 +0000, Alan Cox wrote:
> Ok to try and solidify this here is a proposal for how we move ahead
> which avoids the concerns about gconf and magic symlinks but uses the
> environment. At the same time it allows us to change the rules later.

There are some problems with environment variables though.

* They have to be set somewhere. This is would mean gnome-session for
gnome. If you don't use that (say you run a gnome app under some other
desktop or a plain wm) then things will break because the env vars don't
exist.
* You can't change environment variables in already running processes,
so the whole "make this my templates directory" ui would force you to
log out to enable the change.
* Something similar happens if an app gets a special directory that
doesn't exist and is forced to create it. Now it can't propagate the new
env var to other processes. This is ok as long as all apps will create
the same directory name, but that might not be true if there are other
implementations than gnome of the fdo standard (which only defined then
env vars, not the default translations).
* The values of the env vars has to be stored somewhere so that gnome-
session can set them on login. How this is done isn't defined, which
means it'll be stored in different places for each desktop. So, if you
log in to another desktop you'll get a different set of special
directories.

I don't understand in what way this would be better than the symlink
method.

Plus, it has the disadvantages of the symlink method I listed in my
first mail.