Re: master f8fed41 2/3: image-dired: Improve XDG compliance

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Stefan Kangas <stefan@marxist.se>
> Date: Tue, 26 Oct 2021 16:24:30 +0200
> Cc: Emacs developers <emacs-devel@gnu.org>
> 
> Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:
> 
> > I'm against seeing more and more
> > xdg-FOO stuff in the application code.  That's not why we agreed to
> > include it in Emacs.
> 
> I don't see why: as I explained, this will make implementing your idea
> easier, not harder.  Right?

No.  What will happen is we will see the proliferation of the likes of
this:

  (cond
    ((eq system-type 'windows-nt
       (or (w32-read-registry
            'HKCU
            "SOFTWARE\\Microsoft\\Windows\\CurrentVersion\\Explorer\\User Shell 
Folders" "Personal")
            "~/../My Documents"
            "~/../../Documents"))
    ((eq system-type 'darwin "~/Documents"))
    (t (xdg-documents-directory)))

and similarly for other standard directories, in our application code.
I really hope this is not what we want to see there.  My idea was to
hide all this platform-specific ugliness under a standard API, such as
(user-std-directory 'DOCUMENTS) or maybe a set of APIs like
(user-documents-directory), (user-music-directory), etc.  I thought it
will be a no-brainer that using the latter will be both cleaner, more
readable, and easier in maintenance; am I the only one who thinks so?