Re: External Dep Proposal for 2.20: xdg-user-dirs

[Bastien Nocera <hadess hadess net>]

On Sun, 2007-05-06 at 12:21 -0400, Matthias Clasen wrote:
> On 5/5/07, Luca Ferretti <elle uca libero it> wrote:
> > In the past months Alexander Larsson worked on a freedesktop.org "spec"
> > and tool to <quote>manage well known user directories like the desktop
> > folder and the music folder</quote>.
> >
> > You can find all needed info on this webpage [1] and in xdg mailing list
> > archives.
> >
> > Now, some GNOME modules are using this tool, when available. Grepping my
> > changelogs I found:
> >
> >       * totem: use xdg-user-dirs to add some default directories to the
> >         "Open" dialogues (2007-03-26)
> >       * epiphany: use xdg-user-dirs to get a better default Downloads
> >         directory (2007-04-23)
> >       * sound-juicer: use xdg-user-dirs to set a nice default target for
> >         encoded files (2007-03-26)
> >       * evince:  use the xdg-user-dirs DOCUMENTS folder as default
> >         folder when opening a file chooser (2007-04-02)
> >       * gnome-screensaver: use XDG user dirs to find pictures directory
> >         (2007-04-23)
> >
> > Patches for Nautilus (desktop and templates directories) and Panel
> > (desktop directory) are ready (and available in Fedora SRPMs).
> >
> 
> There is also a patch for the GTK+ filechooser, currently only in the Fedora
> rpm, and a bunch more application patches, which we'll hopefully get into
> upstream bugzilla/svn soon.

xdg-user-dirs is an optional, run-time dependency. It doesn't need to be
there for applications to run fine.

I'd rather applications used the support that should be added to glib,
which would allow monitoring the aliases file so that applications that
make (long-standing) use of xdg-user-dirs are informed about the user
having moved/renamed a particular directory (Nautilus already supports
that I believe).

For applications that want to add some shortcuts to their file choosers,
the current implementation is fine. Same if you use xdg-user-dirs to set
defaults. And unless you use another piece of code to read and keep the
aliases updates (be it in-applications, or, better, in glib), not
leaving the default dirs up to the users would be a mistake.

-- 
Bastien Nocera <hadess hadess net>