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For quite some time now we've discussed possible solutions to the

problem of "well-known" folders in both Gnome and in the Fedora

project. By this I mean folders in the users home directory like the

desktop directory or the "download" directory. The main use for

directories like this is so we can default some settings and things

like initial file selector directory to a slightly more helpful place

than the home directory. 

Strongly related to this is the localization (i.e. translation) of

said directories. Now, there are two basic ways to handle this, either

you use english foldernames (this is de-facto what we do now with

~/Desktop) and translate it in the user interface, or you use

localized folder names and somehow store a pointer to the folder

that is used. Both of these methods have advantages and disadvantages,

so unfortunately all discussions tend to turn into flamewars, which

means we've never really gotten anywhere with this.

I really, really want to solve this for Fedora 7 though, and if

possible it would be nice if we could come up with a shared standard

for this. So, I've come up with a proposal that I think is a good

starting point, and I'd like some feedback on it.

I've picked the localized filenames on disk approach for two main

reasons. First of all, its the only solution that has any chance to

create a consistant user interface. We'll get translated filenames not

only in Gnome and KDE, but also in 3rd party apps like acroread. There

is also no discrepancy between what is showed in the UI and what goes

in filenames. Secondly, its the approach that is easiest to opt out of

(if you hate this idea) or configure as you'd like (if you have a 10

year old homedir structure).

One of the risks with localized filenames on disk is that people don't

use the right API to find the right place, but instead just hardcode

$HOME/Desktop. This is a common problem in windows where people

hardcode the path to "Programs Files", instead of using the right API

to find it, causing most users of non-english windows to have two such

dirs (one translated, one english). So, we need to make it as easy as

possible to look up the right directory. Especially from scripts,

which are the most likely to otherwise hardcode the directory.

I've put up a rough version of my approach here:

http://www.gnome.org/~alexl/xdg-user-dirs-0.0.1.tar.gz

(It has no dependencies but libc)

Here is how it works:

Somewhere (early) in the login scripts we run the command

xdg-user-dirs-update. It reads a config file (/etc/xdg/user-dirs.conf)

and a list of user dir defaults (/etc/xdg/user-dirs.defaults). (By

default, it also respects the xdg basedir spec env vars.) It also loads

the current user dir configuration (~/.config/user-dirs.dirs) if it

exists.

For each default specified dir type (DESKTOP, DOWNLOAD, etc) that is

not already in the user config the we create the directory and add it

to the config file. The directory name used is based on the config

file, but we also use gettext with the translations from the package

to translate pathname elements.

Some old directories (like ~/Desktop) are special cased such that a

translated version of them are not created if the old one exists

already. This gives some backwards compatibility.

If a user-configured directory doesn't exist anymore (i.e. the user

deleted it) we don't recreate it, instead we change the setting to

point it to $HOME for this dir. This means that its effectively

disabled, and apps work as they do now (defaulting to $HOME).

There is also a --force flag that ignores any existing user settings

and just creates and sets up localized dirs. This is useful if there

has been a new translation added and you want to update to that. We

can't really do this automatically since the old filename might be

stored in all sorts of places.

In order to make it really easy for scripts to use this we store the

user settings in a form that is compatible with /bin/sh. This means

you can use them as simple as:

source ~/.config/user-dirs.dirs

echo $XDG_DOWNLOAD_DIR

Here is how the current default config files look, as an example.

The actual set is not final, I just made up some that I think make

sense. Maybe we should have more/others.

/etc/xdg/user-dirs.conf:

--------------------

enabled=True

--------------------

/etc/xdg/user-dirs.defaults:

--------------------

# Default settings for user directories

#

# The values are relative pathnames from the home directory and

# will be translated on a per-path-element basis into the users locale

DESKTOP=Desktop

DOWNLOAD=Download

TEMPLATES=Templates

PUBLICSHARE=Public

DOCUMENTS=Documents

MUSIC=Music

PHOTOS=Photos

# Another alternative is:

#MUSIC=Documents/Music

#PHOTOS=Documents/Photos

--------------------

And here is a typical ~/.config/user-dirs.dir 

--------------------

# This file is written by xdg-user-dirs-update

# If you want to change or add directories, just edit the line your

interested in

# All local changes will be retained on the next run

# Format is XDG_xxx_DIR="$HOME/yyy", where yyy is shell-escaped. No

other format supported.

# 

XDG_DESKTOP_DIR="$HOME/Desktop"

XDG_DOWNLOAD_DIR="$HOME/Nerladdat"

XDG_TEMPLATES_DIR="$HOME/Templates"

XDG_PUBLICSHARE_DIR="$HOME/Public"

XDG_DOCUMENTS_DIR="$HOME/Dokument"

XDG_MUSIC_DIR="$HOME/Musik"

XDG_PHOTOS_DIR="$HOME/Foton"

--------------------

Also included in the sources is a ANSI-C version of

xdg_user_dir_lookup() (in xdg-user-dir-lookup.c). Its very simple,

uses only libc and is fully contained in one functions. This makes it

really easy to cut and paste into any C/C++ program (for instance as a

distro patch). For real desktop integration however, I expect that

each desktop adds some form of API in their platform so that desktop

applications can easily find these directories. Not to mention that

each desktop should probably integrate this into the GUI. For instance

music apps could add the music dir as a shortcut in the file selector,

etc. The details of that is up to each project.

Some open questions:

* Local translations

Generally filename translations will be shipping with the

xdg-user-dirs package, but it would be nice if admins could add local

translations if the shipped ones don't exist, or if they are

wrong. The admin could just change the defaults to be pre-translated,

but that doesn't work if users use different locales. Unfortunately

editing po-files isn't something i think most admins want to do, maybe

there is a better way to support additional translations?

* Filename encoding

Right now all directories are created in UTF-8. It would be nice to

add a config option to use a specific filename encoding, or to use the

encoding of the users locale. Should be an easy addition to the conf

file.

* Set of directories

I sort of pulled the set of directories out of my ass. Clearly there

need to be a bit more discussion about exactly what we want.

I'd like some feedback from the various desktop projects. Do you think

this is an important area to standardize? Does my approach make sense?

Is my code full of holes?

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

 Alexander Larsson                                            Red Hat, Inc 

                   alexl at redhat.com    alla at lysator.liu.se 

He's an impetuous drug-addicted cyborg possessed of the uncanny powers of an 

insect. She's a mistrustful gypsy safe cracker living on borrowed time. They 

fight crime! 

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