about the xdg user dirs again

[Brian J. Tarricone]

Andrea Santilli wrote:
> Just a couple of questions about the ideal implementation of the user
> directory compatibility thing.
> 
> Does anyone mind if I let thunar write the user directories in gconf? 
> In this way other applications that have no dependencies on thunar might
> access those values without having to reinvent the wheel.

Why thunar?  Why is thunar setting up user directories?  This should be 
a desktop-wide preference, not a part of the file manager's settings dialog.

Does GNOME store these settings in gconf?  It shouldn't; they should 
just be stored in the file in the user's home directory.  There's no 
need to store it anywhere else -- in fact, storing it somewhere else 
defeats one of the major benefits of the spec, that it doesn't depend on 
an software specific to any one desktop environment.

> I thought about this: an "auto" value for a directory key that tries to
> fetch the xdg user directory pathname. You could override that value by
> entering a new path but if this is unexisting or inaccessible it could
> switch back to auto.

Sorry, I don't really understand what you mean here.  Why do you need an 
  'auto' mode?  The directory that you use is either a) the directory 
specified in the xdg-user-dirs config file, or, if it doesn't exist, a 
default value.

> Also, in auto mode, the desktop and template directories could be
> created in they dont exist and point to ~/Desktop and ~/Templates if
> they aren't defined by the xdg thing while the other directories could
> point to ~ in the same case.

Please read the spec again, and the related emails on xdg-list.  We're 
supposed to run something in our xinitrc that sets this up the first 
time if it isn't set up already.  There's no need to do anything fancy 
here.  The spec is pretty dirt-simple, and for good reason; let's not 
complicate it.

	-brian