[PATCH 0/2] XDG basedir bin dirs

[Josh Triplett]

On Wed, May 02, 2018 at 07:53:47PM +0200, Lennart Poettering wrote:
> On Di, 29.08.17 18:42, Johannes Löthberg (johannes at kyriasis.com) wrote:
> 
> heya,
> 
> > I've had some old patches around for the XDG basedir spec, and figured I 
> > might as well finally send them in and see what people think.
> > 
> > The first one just reformats some text and fixes some inconsistent 
> > indentation, so should be pretty uncontroversial.
> > 
> > The second patch adds XDG_BIN_HOME and XDG_BIN_DIRS to the basedir spec, 
> > standardizing ~/.local/bin as the default user-specific bin directory.
> 
> Sorry for dropping the ball on this one.
> 
> The whole discussion just came up on fedora devel again, so I figured
> I really should merge this now. I hence pinged Allison about this, one
> of the original spec authors, and she suggested we should not define
> any new env vars but simply document the dir as ~/.local/bin. 

While I don't think we need the full complexity of $XDG_BIN_DIRS, having
$XDG_BIN_HOME to override seems useful, for the same reason as the rest
of the $XDG_* variables. (With the full benefit of hindsight, I'd have
suggested having a single $XDG_HOME that defaults to ~/.local, serving as the root for
everything except $XDG_CONFIG_HOME, so that people could choose to point
it somewhere other than ~/.local without having to set a pile of
individual variables, but I don't think we can do anything
about that now. So given the current state, I think we should have an
$XDG_BIN_HOME analogous to the other $XDG_* variables to allow people to
point this elsewhere if they want. If they do, they'll have to take care
of getting it into $PATH and similar, but tools that install binaries
can use the desired directory as the target for installation.)

- Josh Triplett