basedir spec and plugins

[Rodney Dawes]

On Fri, 2009-06-26 at 15:19 +0200, Stefan.Kost at nokia.com wrote:
> hi,
>  
> the spec [1] only talks about
> XDG_DATA_DIRS/HOME -> e.g. icons, docs, ... equiv of e.g. /usr/share
> XDG_CONFIG_DIRS/HOME -> settings, equiv of /etc
> XDG_CACHE_DIRS/HOME -> e.g. a plugin cache, equiv of /var/cache
>  
> but there is nothing for plugins (equiv of /usr/lib). E.g. the user
> aquired the gstreamer mp3 decoder plugin from fluendo (which sits
> right now in ~/.gstreamer-0.10/plugins). If this would justify xdg
> where should t go instead? Would it make sense to add a
> XDG_LIB_HOME -> $HOME/.local/lib
> gstreamer could then use $XDG_LIB_HOME/gstreamer-0.10/

This would be very nice indeed. However, there is a slight problem with
the scope. What about 32-bit vs. 64-bit? And what about arch-independent
plug-ins? I suspect they probably shouldn't all go in the same
directory, especially for systems where you might dual-boot both 32 and
64 bit OSes. However, I do agree we need a solution, since plug-ins
aren't really generic data or configuration information.
 
> Would we also want this for executables?
> XDG_BIN_HOME -> $HOME/.local/bin

Doesn't $PATH solve this already? I don't really see the point of adding
another variable which duplicates what $PATH does.