Re: [openMSX-devel] A proposal for the 'openMSX application data location' bug

[Max A. F. <ma...@co...>]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Manuel Bilderbeek [mailto:ma...@ms...]
> Sent: Wednesday, February 18, 2009 10:59
> To: ope...@li...
> Subject: Re: [openMSX-devel] A proposal for the 'openMSX application data
location'
> bug
> 
> Agreed for data that is not very interesting to the user (such as
> settings.xml or persistent data like CMOS data).
> 
> So, what do we do with the data dirs which contain user output which
> should be easily accessible?

It's a great question.

I think the general answer is to make most or all of this stuff
configurable.  So the particular question we're dealing with is where to
store these things by default.

In general, we should follow the Windows design guidelines. They distinguish
between user-generated data and application-generated data.  The former
belongs in "Documents" (or better, in a specialized subdirectory like
"Pictures"), the latter in the hidden AppData directory.

So, for the stuff you mentioned, we could either figure out which specialty
subdirectory it belongs to, or keep doing what we're doing
"Documents\openMSX".  Things like "tape recordings" and "prints" have no
obvious specialty, and separating the target directories by category would
force users to do a random walk through their Document folders.

I conclude that continuing to do what we do for user-created content seems
right.  In the code, this would probably translate into two different types
of calls to FileOperations::getUserHomeDir - one for app-generated content
(resulting in \Application Data\Local\openMSX), another for user-generated
content (resulting in \Documents\openMSX).