Re: [PATCH] checking eww download directory

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> From: Mark Oteiza <mvoteiza@udel.edu>
> Date: Fri, 27 Jan 2017 15:17:10 -0500
> Cc: emacs-devel@gnu.org
> 
> > How hard would it be to integrate with the xdg-user-dirs standard
> > instead? On many GNU/Linux systems, running "xdg-user-dir DOWNLOAD" is
> > enough (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/13161226/).  This would
> > make eww consistent with Firefox, too (they take the slightly more
> > painful route of parsing ~/.config/user-dirs.dirs:
> > https://dxr.mozilla.org/mozilla-release/source/xpcom/io/SpecialSystemDirectory.cpp#256)
> 
> An xdg.el would be nice to have for elisp that interfaces
> with XDG-following things.  mpc.el and image-dired.el are two files that
> come to mind: mpd follows [0], image-dired
> supports [1].  Actually, it looks like those are the only two files with
> XDG bits, and I put them there.  How about that.
> 
> Anyways, these aren't difficult to implement.  If it would be a welcome
> addition I'd have a go at writing it.
> 
> [0] https://standards.freedesktop.org/basedir-spec/basedir-spec-latest.html
> [1] https://specifications.freedesktop.org/thumbnail-spec/thumbnail-spec-latest.html

This has come up before.  I think this would be welcome, but one issue
that didn't get resolved is how much of that should be automatic
(i.e. should Emacs automatically search certain directories for
certain kinds of files), and if so, how to split the imaginary xdg.el
into two parts, with the automatic part living in some preloaded file
(probably files.el).  There's also the issue of whether users and/or
Lisp programs should be able to disable this search (e.g., by binding
some variable).

Also, IMO supporting this on Windows will need a new primitive written
in C, but that's an aside, and can be omitted in the initial
implementation.

Thanks.