Base Directory Spec Queries

[Waldo Bastian]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

On Tuesday 05 August 2003 06:18, Biju Chacko wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I was just reading the Base Directory Spec so that I could hack support
> for it into XFce 4.2. I have a few queries:
>
> 1. Why does $XDG_CONFIG_DIRS default to the rather cryptic /etc/xdg
> rather than, say, /etc/desktop-config ?

The name "desktop" has been avoided in general since some people interpret 
that in a rather narrow way. There may also be specs that want to use the 
Base Directory Spec but that can have application outside a desktop context, 
such as the mimetype spec. 

> 2. Why isn't there a system-wide counterpart to $XDG_CACHE_HOME? I
> realise that /var/cache is obvious ... but it offends my sense of
> symmetry not to have it explicitly stated. :)

In the case of $XDG_CONFIG_DIRS and $XDG_DATA_DIRS there is a strong relation 
between the system-wide files and the user-wide files and it is to a large 
extent up to the user / admin to decide whether to place files in user-
specific or system-specfic locations.

With cache data this is much less the case. It pretty much follows from the 
design of the application whether the data should be cached on a per-user 
basis or on a system-wide basis. It's IMHO also very unlikely that an 
application wants to combine both system-wide and user-wide cache locations.

> 3. How stable is this spec? Is there any plan to work on it further? It
> seems pretty clean and complete to me, but I thought I'd ask... :)

There may be additions such as $XDG_CACHE_HOME but existing parts should not 
change.

> 4. Is there a reference implementation? That is, is there code that I
> could spend a couple of hours downloading, studying, compiling and
> installing so that I could avoid writing the 10 lines or so needed to
> support it? :)

No, not yet. Maybe an "xdg-config" tool would make a nice reference 
implementation.

Cheers,
Waldo
- -- 
bastian at kde.org -=|[ SuSE, The Linux Desktop Experts ]|=- bastian at suse.com
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.0.6 (GNU/Linux)
Comment: For info see http://www.gnupg.org

iD8DBQE/L5VbN4pvrENfboIRAixAAJwPThADJq3IB8oVp6Y/l0eI3hKsngCfQv2N
YoOxYujAcgQEnKiFULOnmQw=
=sbkn
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----