Hi all,

several days ago, I posted a message to packages@ asking if it was ok to add
some directories (used by lots of packages) to the *.pkg.dist files.

I was going to commit the changes now, but realized that it may not be a good
idea to do it this way.  First, the directories to be added are:

share/application-registry
share/applications
share/icons
share/images
share/mime-info
share/sounds
share/themes

Most of them are used only by GNOME applications, although this will likely
change in a near future because of some standarization efforts.  (i.e., KDE
3.2 has started to use share/applications.)

If I add them to the *.pkg.dist files, their handling is trivial.  They are
always created if missing during installation of packages, print-PLIST does
the right job by removing @dirrm entries for them, etc.  But these directories
are out of control of the packages system.  I mean, they are not registered in
any package file list.

The other solution could be to add all of them in the xdg-dirs package, and
fix all other packages using these directories to depend on xdg-dirs
accordingly.  This seems better because these directories will only be created
when needed, and can be removed when deinstalling all packages using them.
Even though, xdg-dirs (as well as gnome*-dirs) seem useless in a pkgviews
world (but I think we can workaround this in a future).

Which solution do you think is better?  I'm starting to prefer modifiying
xdg-dirs instead of the *.pkg.dist files.

BTW, I've seen that some linux distributions like Fedora Core or SuSE have
one or more packages doing exactly this (i.e., create standard empty
directories at installation time).

Thanks.

-- 
Julio M. Merino Vidal <jmmv@menta.net>
The NetBSD Project - http://www.NetBSD.org/