On Jan 4, 2015, at 20:24, random832@fastmail.us wrote:
On Fri, Jan 2, 2015, at 20:50, Steven D'Aprano wrote:
Getting OS X right is very complicated, as Andrew has so ably explained.
In Linux and other Unixes, the situation is like OS X, only more so since there's no one single authority.
However, what authority there is does not allegedly demand that you present dialog boxes and admin elevation prompts to the user (this has been asserted, but no citation has been given).
Where has that, or anything remotely similar, been alleged or asserted? What _has_ been asserted is that an app has to fit in with the choices made by the platform implementation. And the only example given was given with a direct quote from the spec linked in the preceding email. I'm not sure how much simpler a citation you need in order to be able to follow it. The example was about platform-specific ways to allow admins to disable sticky-bit checking on network mounts. There are more such things that are left incompletely specified, or explicitly left unspecified for future development. I don't think any of them have anything to do with dialog boxes or other user interaction, and I don't recall anyone saying otherwise. (I suppose if you didn't read carefully, you might take something like "SHOULD warn the administrator" as implying a prompt saying "Go get your sys admin and drag him over to the screen" rather than, say, a syslog warning with a string the admin can see later and look up in help or google).
You have a choice of desktop environments, which may or may not provide a move-to-trash API, including no desktop environment at all. Gnome provides an API for moving to trash, but I don't know how well it supports the freedesktop standard; KDE supports the freedesktop standard, but I don't know if it provides an API that can be called. XFCE has partial support.
I don't see why you need to call an API to the desktop enviroment. The entire point of the spec is to provide compatibility _between_ implementations on the same filesystem - you can quit gnome and log into KDE and see the same trash. Python would just be a separate implementation that stands by itself.
The last sentence is exactly the same thing you already got two detailed answers to that you haven't responded to in any way. So I suspect the reason you don't understand why calling an API is a good idea is that you skimmed over the explanations that would explain exactly that. Go back and read those emails.