[haiku] Re: "Pictures" folder? (aka; default folders in /home/ for common media types)

  • From: Ryan Leavengood <leavengood@xxxxxxxxx>
  • To: haiku@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Thu, 12 Jul 2012 16:49:29 -0400

On Thu, Jul 12, 2012 at 1:54 PM, Pete Goodeve <pete.goodeve@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> I'm not too enthused by schemes like this.  My Ubuntu system kindly
> provides such repositories, but they tend to stay empty, as I usually
> have other ideas as to organization.

Obviously there is never really a perfect "one-size-fits-all" solution
to something like this, but I personally agree with Justin that a set
of default folders for common file types would be useful. One that I
think we definitely need is Downloads, I hate how WebPositive just
dumps everything on the Desktop. I know that is configurable now but
there is no reason to force users to create a ~/Downloads directory
and then change the Web+ setting when that is a great default.

> For example, storing all my images in one 'Pictures' folder would get
> unwieldy fast; they rather get put in different folders according to
> their context.  Perhaps all with a common root, but more usually
> connected by convenient links.

Well certainly Pictures could just be a directory with subdirectories?

> More importantly, I usually *don't* use 'home' as the root of all my
> data files -- especially as one tends to have a number of different
> bootable Haiku systems.  So I dedicate a separate partition to
> holding all that stuff.

That is generally true for most people who use Haiku in any serious
fashion, so I agree being able to configure the location of these
default directories would be nice. See more below...

> What might be more useful than specific default folders would
> be user-specifiable path lists, like the other current environment
> variable '...PATH's: "PICTURE_PATH", "MUSIC_PATH", and so on.

How about they be defined as find_directory constants which can be
changed using a preference tool?

find_directory(B_USER_DOWNLOADS_DIRECTORY)

Those could then we easily exported in the Terminal usind the finddir
tool if you wanted the above environment variables.

-- 
Regards,
Ryan

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