Re: XDG and Freedesktop (was: Re: Program to dole out jpg's to subdirctories, card-dealing style.)

On Mon, 30 Jun 2025 18:50:40 -0000 (UTC)
Eli the Bearded <*@eli.users.panix.com> wrote:

Also XDG has a very limited understanding of how people may organize
files. I don't have a "templates" directory, I'm not even sure what
I'd put in one. I don't have a "music" directory, and I don't need
one.

Strictly speaking xdg-user-dirs is supposed to be configurable wrt.
where exactly it locates these - but yeah, there's a lot of baked-in
assumptions about how a user's files should be organized and the whole
thing looks mostly like a "because MS did it" post-hoc standard.

Like, okay, music/pictures/etc. I get, but "templates" has always
baffled me; do they think everyone does mass mail-merge on the regular?
Or is there some breed of weirdo out there that does all their letter-
writing/Paint doodling/whatever by opening up an existing document,
making changes, and saving it as a new file?

"Public" also strikes me as bass-ackwards - assuming you're even *on* a
shared system, wouldn't it make more sense to keep public files in a
common location, rather than having to remember whether it was Ted or
Carol who had the new wifi password for the Internet-enabled toaster in
their ~/Public/confidential-office-info.txt ?