Base Directory Spec Intended Purpose

[Thomas Leonard]

On Wed, Aug 06, 2003 at 02:09:00PM +0200, Waldo Bastian wrote:
[...]
> For example it may be useful to make a XDG spec (based on the base dir
> spec) that defines specific locations where applications can store
> application- and user-specific data / configuration information of the
> various kinds.
> 
> For comparison, KDE uses $KDEHOME/share/config/<Application-Name>rc  to
> store the main configuration information for <Application-Name>, and
> reserves $KDEHOME/share/apps/<Application-Name>/ to store additional
> data for <Application-Name>
> 
> For me personally it's not really a priority since KDE provides a good
> solution for KDE applications and since this would be about application-
> specific data anyway it doesn't really have an impact on
> interoperability. The value of such spec would mainly lie in keeping the
> user's home dir neat and tidy, which is of course a valuable goal in and
> of its own.

The main advantages of this would be:

- Only one environment variable to change to specify all config locations.

- Only one directory to backup to save/restore config.

- Only one place to look in for config (right now, you have to know which
  desktop your application is affiliated to).


-- 
Thomas Leonard			http://rox.sourceforge.net
tal00r at ecs.soton.ac.uk	tal197 at users.sourceforge.net
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