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Use the XDG Base Directory Specification

xdgbasedirectoryspecification.com

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Re: Use the XDG Base Directory Specification

#51

Post by comex »

OJFord wrote: post #4
fiddlerwoaroof wrote: post #3

I strongly disagree: the dot files cause very little inconvenience because they’re typically hidden and they’re easier to type and list than the XDG spec stuff

The XDG defaults put them all (per category like config/data/cache) inside one 'typically hidden' directory, how is that not better? You're also making an assumption that the alternative is $HOME/.appconfig, which it might be, but that's not any particular standard. It might just as well end up $HOME/app.config or $HOME/Library/Application Support/MacOs/Resources/App.app/config/Config/Resources/config.

The kinds of programs that were putting in entirely nonstandard paths (~/app.config), or paths specific to macOS or Windows, are still doing that.

But when it comes to a 'well-behaved' Unix program, there used to be one place to look for its configuration, and now there are three.

That is, a program foo could still have its configuration in ~/.foo, but now it can also have it in ~/.config/foo or ~/.local/share/foo. If I don't know where the configuration is already, I have to check all of them.

I know ~/.local/share is supposed to be for "data files" and ~/.config is supposed to be for "configuration files", but in practice the distinction seems to be rather unclear.

Also, ~/.local/share/foo is a lot slower to type than ~/.foo even with tab completion. Why does that path need to be two directories deep? ~/.config/foo is less bad but still slower.

Re: Use the XDG Base Directory Specification

#53

Post by jojo14 »

XDG specs are crap. Sure one single ~/.config folder is a very good idea. But I want it clearly visible such as ~/config. But I don't want an additional and confusing ~/.local.

Plus I don't want ~/Videos or ~/Pictures folders. I am not dumb. Let me organize my folders according to my needs and my will.

The first thing I do when I setup a user account is removing those useless XDG folders.

XDG pretend to remove folder clusterfuck then why do they add their crappy folders?

Re: Use the XDG Base Directory Specification

#54

Post by delta_p_delta_x »

heywoodlh wrote: post #38
000ooo000 wrote: post #32

In what world is simply dumping config items for your app in the user's home directory sensible? Why stop at config items? Do cache or temp crap too. The thought process of persisting with this baffles me. Microsoft would be absolutely ridiculed if one day your msword preferences appeared on your desktop as an XML file, and no matter what, it kept reappearing.

Yeah, although, I'm not a huge fan of Microsoft's default config file locations either. Some examples: - PowerShell Core's default profile is in $HOME\Documents\PowerShell -- or if you have OneDrive enabled, $HOME\OneDrive\Documents\PowerShell. - Windows Terminal is $HOME\AppData\Local\Packages\Microsoft.WindowsTerminal_8wekyb3d8bbwe\LocalState\settings.json. I can feel pretty confident assuming that if Microsoft can…

Microsoft (and subsidiaries, e.g. 343 Industries), is somehow even worse at adhering to its own norms. Now, I have .vscode and .dotnet folders in the top level of %USERPROFILE%. Even Visual Studio creates a stupid %USERPROFILE%\source\repos directory tree, when I never told it to.

I am fed up by this, and have completely given up on maintaining the tidiness of my %USERPROFILE% and %USERPROFILE\Documents. Almost all video games have absolutely no respect whatsoever for OS norms, and just spew their config and save data all over the damn place in %USERPROFILE%\, %USERPROFILE%\My Games\, %USERPROFILE%\\. The worst thing is that Windows has a place specifically for video game saves: %USERPROFILE%\Saved Games, or programmatically in C/C++: `SHGetKnownFolderPath(FOLDERID_SavedGames, ...)`.

To add to the mix, I also have GNU/Linux-first programs like SSH, Gradle, etc that just straight-up create dot-directories and dotfiles in the top level of %USERPROFILE%. Windows is not Unix/Linux; a dot prefix does not mean 'hidden'. Windows has an explicit 'hidden' filesystem metadata tag that programmers need to (and frequently forget to) set: `SetFileAttributesA(filePath, FILE_ATTRIBUTE_HIDDEN)`.

Home, not so sweet home.

Re: Use the XDG Base Directory Specification

#55

Post by jenadine »

jojo14 wrote: post #53

XDG specs are crap. Sure one single ~/.config folder is a very good idea. But I want it clearly visible such as ~/config. But I don't want an additional and confusing ~/.local. Plus I don't want ~/Videos or ~/Pictures folders. I am not dumb. Let me organize my folders according to my needs and my will. The first thing I do when I setup a user account is removing those useless XDG folders. XDG pretend to remove folder…

> I want it clearly visible such as ~/config.

No problems: define the $XDG_CONFIG_HOME to be like so.

> I don't want an additional and confusing ~/.local.

The idea is that data and config are different. Anyway, if you have different taste, that's ok, define $XDG_DATA_HOME to be the same as config.

> I don't want ~/Videos or ~/Pictures folders

That's not in the XDG spec.

Re: Use the XDG Base Directory Specification

#56

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

clhodapp wrote: post #36
yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If everything honored this spec, including the part where it reads environment variables to see where the different directories are, you could do that by sticking the right variables in your environment. I think the one legitimate exception to the rule is profile, because you need that in order to set the variables in the first place. So that one would somehow have to be hard coded to at least have a wider search pat…

Maybe your profile location ought to be something that you're able to set through chsh

Huh. So I was about to disagree because that felt like a kludge, but actually you're right; setting your shell and its environment are both things that have to be set before the user's normal environment is working for bootstrapping reasons, so yeah, it does make perfect sense to cover both with the same mechanism. Or maybe to make it more generic we could replace the "shell" line in passwd with a "login command" entry, which is always executed by the system /bin/sh with the system environment from /etc/profile? Then you could set it to `XDG_CONFIG_HOME=$HOME/mydotfiles /bin/shell`, or `/bin/decrypt-my-home; export XDG_CONFIG_HOME=$HOME/Library/config; exec /bin/bash --init-file $HOME/Library/bash/bashrc` or whatever you want.

Re: Use the XDG Base Directory Specification

#57

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

pxc wrote: post #21
Eduard wrote: post #12

> ... State :... if the data is unique for a given machine, the file belongs [to $XDG_STATE_HOME / $HOME/.local/state] This statement is misleading/wrong. Like all other XDG stuff, it's not about the machine, it's about the particular user. Also, why does the author consider the given positive example clean and tidy, when it has files .profile and .bashrc placed directly in the user's home directory? Following the ru…

> This statement is misleading/wrong. Like all other XDG stuff, it's not about the machine, it's about the particular user. No, it's both. The XDG state dir is for things that are also machine-specific so that, e.g., it doesn't make sense to sync them as part of your dotfiles. > why does the author consider the given positive example clean and tidy, when it has files .profile and .bashrc placed directly in the user's…

> No, it's both. The XDG state dir is for things that are also machine-specific so that, e.g., it doesn't make sense to sync them as part of your dotfiles.

It was probably written back when it was more common to have your home on NFS, although I'm not sure how that would work without needing to use overlayfs per-machine or something.

Re: Use the XDG Base Directory Specification

#58

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

eviks wrote: post #40

Weird how this promotional article is weak re advice for the most popular OS (and personal experience isn't the only source of insight)

> for the most popular OS

Android doesn't really do dot files. Or config files that the user can see at all.

(And if you'd like to amend to "the most used desktop OS", this is obviously aimed at unix-likes, but actually Windows does have an equivalent standard and programs targeting that platform really should be following it just like programs targeting unix-likes really should follow this)

Re: Use the XDG Base Directory Specification

#59

Post by jenadine »

Somebody should tell that to the Rust people. They have a .cargo and a .rustup folder in ~, plus an extra heavy target folder for every project. Would be much nicer if they put the cache one .cache

But they don't seem to care https://github.com/rust-lang/cargo/issues/1734 https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/pull/1615 https://github.com/rust-lang/cargo/pull/9178

Re: Use the XDG Base Directory Specification

#60

Post by happymellon »

agnos wrote: post #50

How did OP manage to get rid of ~/.mozilla? It's the only offending dotfile left in my $HOME and the stickiest. Until Mozilla fixes their 19-year-old feature request to support XDG [1], I couldn't find a workaround that wasn't a total hack. [1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=259356

Would this work?

https://github.com/queer/boxxy

[Edit] woops, I didn't notice that it is linked right at the bottom.

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