Default paths in Base Directory Specification

[Owen Taylor]

On Tue, 2004-09-14 at 10:08, Dan Winship wrote:
> On Tue, 2004-09-14 at 14:47 +0100, Mike Hearn wrote:
> > What's wrong with the proposed solution of just setting it in the 
> > startup scripts, like PATH?
> 
> What's wrong with the solution of removing /usr and /usr/local from the
> default value and making all OSes have to deal with the problem? It
> would be much more consistent than your proposal.
> 
> (Answer: "but that would suck". Exactly.)

Would it suck? (other than it being a change?) Not really,
it's just a single thing for the system integrator to
set. But there is clearly no point other than perhaps
making people feel a bit better... when XDG_DATA_DIRS
is set the default value is ignored.

The thing that is being missed here is that adding @PREFIX@ 
to the implicit XDG_DATA_DIRS

 - Slightly helps the case where the system integrator is putting
   everything somewhere else.

 - Slightly helps the place where the user is putting everything
   somewhere else (probably with a build script)

These are easy to deal with anyways. But the thing that it hard is the
user putting a single package somewhere else. With the implicit
addition of @PREFIX@, we go from:

 - System integrator set XDG_DATA_DIRS to point to the system
   MIME database so it continues working for the one-off package.

To:

 - User has to set XDG_DATA_DIRS to point back to the system
   MIME database. (In /usr/pkg, say)

It doesn't seem any better to me. 

Regards,
						Owen

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