On Thu, Feb 14, 2008 at 02:52:33PM -0800, John Fischer wrote: > The command xdg-user-dirs-update is run very early in the > login phase. This program reads a configuration file, and a set of
How early? > default directories. It then creates localized versions of these > directories in the users home directory and sets up a config file in > $(XDG_CONFIG_HOME)/user-dirs.dirs (XDG_CONFIG_HOME defaults to > ~/.config) that applications can read to find these directories. "It then creates localized versions of these directories..." Really? So if I log in using a different locale than my usual then I'll end up with new directories that I'll never use when I go back to my usual locale?! That doesn't sound right. Or will $(XDG_CONFIG_HOME)/user-dirs.dirs allow me to avoid this issue altogether? But I see that it's hard to do much better. Declaring some English words to be well-known directory names that get localized by the GUIs will probably be very difficult to implement in all the right places, and confusing when some GUI fails to localize them. If we assume that most users are not multi-lingual (much less polyglots) then I think this is probably OK. What do other operating systems do about this problem? > Sysadmins can configure things by editing /etc/xdg/user-dirs.conf. How will this be documented? > At the moment there are only two settings, you can disable the whole > thing, and you can specify the charset encoding used for filenames. Why should a charset be specified here? Presumably the *language* to localize these directory names to comes from the locale chosen by the user, so why can't the charset come from the locale too? > They can also set or change the default directories and their initial > values in /etc/xdg/user-dirs.defaults. How will this be documented? > $(XDG_CONFIG_HOME)/user-dirs.dirs specifies the current set of > directories for the user. This file is in a shell format, so its easy > to access from a shell script. This file can also be modified by users > (manually or via applications) to change the directories used. How will this be documented? What's XDG_CONFIG_HOME? What should this shell script do? Set variables? Will these be exported? What will read this file? Will shell scripts read this file? If so, what credentials and privilege will those shell scripts be running with? Nico --
