What constitutes "user configuration files" in the XDG basedir spec?

[Dieter Plaetinck]

Patryk Zawadzki wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 15, 2009 at 3:53 PM, David Faure <dfaure at trolltech.com> wrote:
>   
>> I think we agree, but we both sent ambiguous enough emails to misunderstand each other :-)
>>     
>
> You are of course 100% right. I misread the quotes in earlier emails
> and thought you were one to imply window size is not config :)
>
>   
Thanks for the replies everyone.
I'll tell you where I'm coming from: I'm having my $XDG_CONFIG_HOME 
under version control.
The goal of this is to have all my "I want app foo to behave exactly 
like this" settings managed carefully.
However, many applications store/update information irrelevant to me 
(last window size/position, last 10 opened items, etc) in there (often 
in the very same files),
which causes those config files to be no longer in sync and require a 
commit (with changes I don't care about) or a revert (ugly, because it's 
very hard to programmatically know if it's safe to revert or not, there 
could be other chances in the file who *are* relevant),
and you can't ignore a particular section or a specific xml element of a 
config file with any VCS, afaik.

I see your points and they make sense.  I think the real issue is no 
longer "is it configuration or not", but rather "is it configuration 
that the user cares about or not"
Maybe we can keep everyone happy if we make the spec specify more then 
one config file per app inside $XDG_CONFIG_{HOME,DIRS}
One such config file would contain all settings explicitly configured by 
the user (or application on behalf of the user), while the other config 
file would store the configs that the application wants to store on it's 
own behalf.
This ways user can manage/ignore with more granularity.  At the very 
least, this would cause a bit better overview (vs all settings 
regardless of their nature in 1 file).

You could even take it a step further and specify naming conventions for 
some known types of configuration (eg: 
$XDG_CONFIG_DIR/myapp/{windowinfo,lastviewed,...}.  Just thinking out 
loud here.

Thanks,
Dieter.
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