Fwd: why not XDG_PREFIX_HOME

[Johannes Löthberg]

Hey,

Quoting Marc Boocha (2017-08-30 10:37:44)
> Instead having an XDG_BIN_HOME, XDG_CONFIG_HOME, XDG_DATA_HOME, we should have
> a single XDG_PREFIX_HOME. This will be located as ~/.local. Since make install
> or package manger normal produce these directories, have separate environmental
> variables is not needed.
> 
> XDG_BIN_HOME is equivalent to XDG_PREFIX_HOME/bin
> 
> XDG_CONFIG_HOME is equivalent to XDG_PREFIX_HOME/etc (currently ~/.config
> although I feel this is more logical)
> 
> XDG_DATA_HOME is equivalent to XDG_PREFIX_HOME/share
> 
> This conserves the number of environmental variable used and makes it easy to
> add extensions like headers and libraries.
> 
> Also since XDG_BIN_DIRS is same as PATH, why is it even needed
> 

While that might be more consistent with the global directories and 
potentially nicer, I have no plans of making breaking changes to the 
spec that would be much less likely to be adopted.  And you'd end up 
having all of them set for likely years before a significant portion of 
software did adopt it.  Some people still would want to have things 
separate, or named differently, so we would still need the old variables 
as well, which would just add more cruft to the spec.  Environment 
variables are cheap, not really a precious resource we need to preserve.

-- 
Sincerely,
  Johannes Löthberg
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