On Monday, 6 April 2015 at 21:40:28 UTC, Marco Leise wrote:
I believe modern desktops offer enough granularity to cover
each of those. For example if I was playing a game on Linux
files would go here:
/usr/share/[games/] - read-only data files.
~/.cache/ - downloaded archives, precompiled scripts, browser
caches and other files that can be recreated or
fetched again if they were to be deleted
~/.config/ - the user's personal configuration; may be
overriding something in a system directory if
desired
~/.local/share/ - pretty much a catch all for save games,
user created content that goes beyond the
scope of config files, highscores,
highlighting schemes in an IDE, Steam, ...
Or the other way around:
data => /usr/share
save games => ~/.local/share
downloaded content => ~/.local/share (or ~/.cache)
configs => ~/.config
Windows has the Local and Roaming directories, which
serve similar but different purposes. E.g. anything machine
specific or big must not be in Roaming.
So if I generally asked for the config dir, I'd probably expect
AppData/Local on Windows and ~/.config on Linux (because I
might write a configuration that only works for this machine.)
Roaming is interesting for users that have their profiles on
servers and might switch to another workstation. So if some
configuration is "portable" and you want to create something
really fine grained you could offer that directory as an
alternative "roaming config dir" (returning null or
"~/.config" on Linux).
In any case there will be multiple results for some
directories (/usr/share, /usr/local/share) and also
several standard paths mapping to the same physical directory
(user data and user cache both map to AppData/Local on
Windows). The user needs to be made aware of this so (s)he
doesn't overwrite files in one standard path with files in a
supposedly different one.
So much for my thoughts on standard paths extreme edition. ;)
Just found out, there's also special Saved Games directory on
Windows. But only starting with Vista, therefore it's not CSIDL,
but KNOWNFOLDERID (same as for Downloads). Still I did not find
fairly new winapi headers for D. Seems like the most use
translation of MinGW headers which stuck at, likely, Windows XP
era. Although we could just read some paths from registry
avoiding calling SHGetKnownFolderPath, it's way too hacky.
Currently the only Roaming directories returned by standardpaths
library on Windows are Templates and Applications, which is fine.
The whole roaming thing is specific to Windows, but it would be
useful to add separate function probably.
The same directory for configs, data and cache locations is the
problem. I should mention it in documentation. Though for cache
directory it returns AppData/Local/cache the same way as Qt does.
