Re: Default for image-dired-main-image-directory

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Ihor Radchenko <yantar92@gmail.com>
> Cc: Stefan Kangas <stefan@marxist.se>,  emacs-devel@gnu.org
> Date: Tue, 26 Oct 2021 21:42:22 +0800
> 
> Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:
> 
> > How about if we DTRT right away, and provide reasonable defaults for
> > all the non-XDG platforms (assuming we prefer platform-specific
> > defaults in this particular case)?  I see no real reason to install
> > half-solutions.
> 
> FYI, there is no-littering package [1] trying to provide unified
> directory structure within .emacs.d.  It follows the same idea of
> unified set of abstract directory variables for different types of data:
> - etc-directory
> - var-directory
> 
> Essentially, it is similar to XDG directory set, but all the directories
> are inside .emacs.d by default.

That's a different philosophy, and since it contradicts XDG, which
many people want, I don't think we can go that way, except as an
opt-in feature (which will then become a maintenance burden, as it
will be yet another, third, set of defaults).

> I think that putting things in a reasonably-names directories inside
> .emacs.d can be a meaningful default, unless there is an OS-specific
> standard (XDG on Linux, de-facto standard on Windows or Mac).

Yes, every modern platform has standardized places for this stuff.  If
we decided to support XDG on GNU/Linux, it follows that we prefer
platform-specific behavior, not identical standard directories on all
platforms.

So we need something like system-config.el, which would use xdg.el for
XDG platforms, and something else for the rest.