basedir spec and plugins

[Marius Vollmer]

ext Thiago Macieira <thiago at kde.org> writes:

> Unless you're thinking of a form of XDG plugin system, I don't see the use-
> case. Can you elaborate on why you thought of this?

I can't peek into Stefan's head, but one argument might be that the user
would want to control where different kinds of things are placed.
Setting XDG_LIB_DIRS/HOME would allow that, at least for the
applications that follow the base dir standard.

It's really the same argument as for not putting libraries into
/usr/share: that place should be architecture independent.  You might
want to share your home directory between machines, and then need to be
careful with the plugins.  (Not a very pressing concern, I admit.)

In that light, I would propose to explicitly include the machine
architecture in the defaults, always.  I.e., the default for
XDG_LIB_DIRS/HOME would be

    $HOME/.local/$(uname -m)/lib/

I would agree that this complicates things for the very common case of a
home directory that only ever sees a single architecture, but it would
be kinda nice from a theoretical point of view.  Maybe the 32/64 bit
variations nowadays make multiple architectures interesting again.