Fallbacks for $XDG_RUNTIME_DIR

Thomas Kluyver thomas at kluyver.me.uk
Wed Jun 3 09:50:35 PDT 2015


I looked into this before, and came to the conclusion that there is no
fallback directory that meets the guarantees $XDG_RUNTIME_DIR provides. If
you want your application to run on older systems that don't provide
$XDG_RUNTIME_DIR, you'll need to think about what properties are important
for your use case, and figure out the best way of making a fallback.
Carefully creating a user-only-readable temp directory might be one
possible strategy.

It would be valuable to collect information on what versions of different
distros provide features such as $XDG_RUNTIME_DIR, so that application
authors can estimate when it's safe to use them without fallbacks.
Something like http://caniuse.com/ for free desktop programming. If
anyone's looking for something to work on, this could be a really neat
website and crowdsourcing effort.

Thomas

On 3 June 2015 at 07:53, Vladimir Kudrya <vladimir-csp at yandex.ru> wrote:

> Hi!
> I wanted to know, what are the valid fallbacks for $XDG_RUNTIME_DIR in
> case it is not defined, or if there are no systemd components present in
> the system to manage /run/user/$UID.
> Basedir spec only references mandatory premissions for such dir, but lacks
> examples for fallbacks.
> Thank you!
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