Crate for "system directories"?

[alexveecle]

It could be cool to bless some library to obtain the user's cache dir, config dir for your app, etc.- this helps write nice CLI tools.

I have seen https://docs.rs/dirs/latest/dirs/ and many others, although I have no experience with any of them (I came here to see if something was recommended already).

[djc]

It's a good question -- there's been a fair bit of churn in these crates.

• dirs has 7.8M recent downloads, last update over 1 year ago
• directories has 2.6M recent downloads, last update over 1 year ago
• There's also the home crate which is maintained by the Cargo team, and is more minimal, with 16M recent downloads

Would you be able to put up a PR with these?

[alexveecle]

Unfortunately, I think https://crates.io/crates/home is excessively minimalistic- I assume it solves the problem it wants to solve for cargo, but really I think most applications should not use ~/.app. And I don't feel qualified to choose between dirs and directories. Are you suggesting a PR that suggests both crates?

[djc]

Yes, I think it makes sense to list both, with dirs going first on account of it being more popular. Ideally we'd provide some notes on the difference but I think it would be okay to punt on that for now.

[nicoburns]

dirs and directories seem to be very similar crates maintained by the same organisation, which dirs being slightly lower level and directories being slightly higher level. Seems reasonable to mention both. Could even just be one entry (probably for dirs with directories mentioned in the notes (HTML links work in notes sections)).

There seems to have been some mild controversy about the introduction of a (first-party) MPL dependency into the dependency tree of both crates, with some people switching to etcetera or custom code (which is built on top of home and has a similar number of downloads to directories) for this reason. Could be worth mentioning as a 3rd option, although we'll want to be careful how we phrase it to avoid stoking conflict.

I think dirs should probably still be the primary recommendation.

[alexveecle]

Tried #142 ; I think this can be marked as resolved and any discussion can continue there.