Re: [Nano-devel] proposal to add support for the XDG base directory spec

[Simon Ochsenreither]

Hi everyone,

> Where is Simon?

sorry for my disappearance, had some exams lately.

> As for /etc/xdg/, should /etc/ really only contain the xdg directory?
> I can kind of understand using ~/.config/ to clean up $HOME, but not 
> /etc/xdg/.

Agree on that. Never understood the intention behind that. Feels like a typo in 
the spec.
This is probably the part of the spec that I would just ignore. (Or propose and 
updated spec, dropping this part.)

> [discussion of file placement]

My position on this is that config files should use XDG_CONFIG_HOME.

For things like history the common accepted approach is to put them into 
XDG_DATA_HOME, as they cannot be automatically recreated by the application 
like cache files.
(The description of XDG_CACHE_HOME is basically "the application might be a bit 
slower after deleting the cache".)

There has been a proposal from Debian to have a state folder: 
https://wiki.debian.org/XDGBaseDirectorySpecification#Proposal:_STATE_directory,
 but I would wait whether this emerges as a standard before adopting it.

> ~/.local/share/ should have been ~/.local-share/ or something else besides a 
> useless nested directory

It was probably unintended by XDG authors, but distributions and people have 
started adding ~/.local/bin to their $PATH for user-local applications. It 
seems like Python was the first larger project to adopt it in 2008:
https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0370/#specification

Modulo concerns about multi-arch architectures, I think this is actually kind 
of neat and should be standardized in the XDG spec (so that it gets its own 
environment variable and people can adjust it to their liking, as many people 
prefer ~/bin or ~/.bin)

I think at least Debian and Ubuntu ~/.local/bin to $PATH if it exists already. 
(Not sure about Fedore, but there was some discussion.)

A few interesting links on that matter:
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=839155
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/bash/+bug/1588562

Thanks,

Simon

PS: I will try and update the patch with your feedback as soon as I have some 
time on my hands again.