XDG and default directories (Re: Adding ~/.local/bin to default PATH)

[Nicolas Mailhot]

Le mercredi 27 juillet 2011 à 12:26 +0200, Stijn Hoop a écrit :
> Hi,
> 
> aside from the merits of adding ~/.local/bin, I just wanted to point
> out:
> 
> On Wed, 27 Jul 2011 12:19:51 +0200
> Nicolas Mailhot <nicolas.mailhot at laposte.net> wrote:
> > It's all been done to make nautilus happy with "user-friendly"
> > "localized" names on the user desktop (aping the windows mess). And
> > now gnome3 people have decided shortcuts on the desktop are a bad
> > idea so the whole justification for those choices does not exist
> > anymore.
> 
> I disagree with this personal assessment; I and some of our users
> instead like the fact that there is now a standard area where to put
> downloads,

I didn't say it was bad that some conventions have started to emerge.
Quite the contrary. However, I *do* regret some of the choices made and
they're already starting to bite us to bite us.

>  and even better is the fact that I can now put that area
> somewhere else than on our default stupidly-expensive backupped NFS
> filesystem.

And what will happen to your users when selinux starts enforcing
download jails and the directory it applies settings to is not the one
you use? Do you really thinks that's hypothetical? Browsers are looking
hard at sandboxing nowadays. Note that other security frameworks do not
even have the path/label separation they work directly on paths.

Really if there was a need (for nfs users for example) for the download
area to reside on a different root it should have been defined on a
different root from the start up (like the rest of the filesystem layout
was done) instead of trying to variabilize the layout. Now the default
locations are just going to be hardcoded right and left with subtle
difficult to debug failures when one tries to move one of them like
proposed by the spec.

-- 
Nicolas Mailhot