I am working on the Ubuntu Media Center distribution (http://www.ubuntumediacenter.org/) and I think it would be a good idea to standardize some common user directories, especially for multimedia desktop applications.
I initiated a specification here : http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Standards_2fcommon_2duser_2ddirectories_2dnaming_2dspec that I am going to update with ideas found in the original thread here http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/xdg/2006-March/007832.html It just needs to have a deeper discussion in order to solve some unresolved issues. The first suggestion is : In the user home directory, add a .directories file that contain the path to standard folders. Example for english countries: MUSIC=~/Music PICTURES=~/Pictures MOVIES=~/Movies ... and in France : MUSIC=~/Musique PICTURES=~/Photos MOVIES=~/Vidéos ... Applications that needs the path to standard directories can look in this file. This solves the problem of localization, because I don't think these directories names must change if the user logs with a different locale. These directories can be created by the distribution when the user is created or when he logs for first time and must not be changed after. However, distributions can offer tools to migrate to another locale. The other big problem is to know what happen if a user deletes or rename one of this directories. I think it should be the responsability of the desktop application (gnome, KDE...) to maintain the consistency between the hidden file and user directories. But I hope you will have a better idea for this... _______________________________________________ xdg mailing list [email protected] http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/xdg
