On Wed, 2010-09-01 at 00:19 +0200, Krzysztof Klimonda wrote: > For example you are saying that emails should go to the directory > specified in user-dirs.[defaults,dirs] but that makes no sense uless > we > are thinking about $DOCUMENTS/.email_app/. Emails, while being > documents, aren't really suited for direct access. The same can be > said > for many other applications that doesn't fit into any of directory > listed in the user-dirs.[defaults,dirs].
Direct access is a misdirection from the real problem of classification. Sure emails shouldn't be just files and rarely would I expect a user to use nautilus to manage their inbox, but the same can be said for most data sets whether they be photo galleries (i.e. cheese) or emails. What having them in user-dirs does is lay down a guarentee that the data will be in a narrower set of standard formats and will make developers think very carefully before they run away inventing new formats, new indexing and new storage mechanisms. Instead what it should promote is the sharing of data between applications. Of course few programmers really want to tie themselves down to using standard formats in known locations with the possibility of having to track externally modified data. It's still not a good excuse to hide user data sets from both users and other developers. Emails, events, bookmarks and contacts are user data sets just like photos, documents and videos and it's a damn shame that we mis-classify them and save their contents in strange places. But this is a gnome problem and judging by that list of non-xdg projects to be converted it looks like only a legion of developers all working on this full time would be able to sort it out. Anyone got a few million quid? > XDG_DATA_HOKE is supposed to be basically a local, user-writable > equivalent of /usr/share. There are many things that fit neither this > requirement nor "user data" description. Yes, and anything else in the XDG_DATA_DIRS list. But few things don't fit in my assessment of the problem. Perhaps we could do with a guide and maybe I can have a word with a few pipe devels about their experiences, requirements and thoughts on the whole thing of data classification and storage. Martin, -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
