User directories integration - request for help

[Ralf Corsepius]

On Mon, 2007-03-19 at 11:13 +0100, Alexander Larsson wrote:
> On Mon, 2007-03-19 at 10:51 +0100, Ralf Corsepius wrote:
> 
> > > It very much does. All applications using the gtk file selector will
> > > have some default folders as file selector bookmars, and *all*
> > > applications get translated filenames for common directories.
> > 
> > And all other applications, such as gui-less apps will be broken.
> 
> How are they broken? The only thing I can see that is possible to break
> is if some application hardcodes ~/Desktop.
Well, how is your local backup script to collect all music files from
~/Musique?

>  Of course, thats already
> broken since gnome has a config option to use $HOME as desktop and KDE
> has a general config option for where to put the desktop directory.

> > Related to this: Explain who all this is supposed without any
> > login-manager (plain su -l without running any GUI)
> 
> If you don't log in through a gui then xdg-user-dirs-update won't be run
> (unless you manually run it). 
You've got it => Your i18n won't take effect. Non-GUI logins will have
to cope with random side-effects of former logins.

Also did you consider simulaneously accessing dirs with different
locales, e.g. network'ed (automounted) homes?

The same $HOME can appear in different locales simultaneously from
different machines.

> This is not a problem 
How this?

> and shouldn't affect
> anything (except you won't get the default dirs if you never run it).
> Everything should keep working as it is right now.
It will not - Nowadays one can write command-line scripts with hard
coded/deterministic directory names to process the files in "Desktop" or
"Pictures", "Music", "Documents", "Mail".

With your approach this won't be possible anymore.

Ralf