Fwd: why not XDG_PREFIX_HOME

[rhkramer at gmail.com]

On Friday, September 15, 2017 07:45:14 AM Johannes Löthberg wrote:
> 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. 

I don't agree with the proposal, but, most especially, ~/.local might be the 
default, but should be easily changeable.  (Also, maybe the default should be 
in terms of another environment variable ($HOME) instead of to an explicit 
location.)

See below.

> > 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.  

+1


> Environment
> variables are cheap, not really a precious resource we need to preserve.