[PATCH 0/2] XDG basedir bin dirs

[Josh Triplett]

On Wed, May 02, 2018 at 09:13:40PM +0200, Lennart Poettering wrote:
> On Mi, 02.05.18 11:30, Josh Triplett (josh at joshtriplett.org) wrote:
> 
> > 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.)
> 
> So yeah, Allison also suggested that having a single "XDG_PREFIX" env
> var would have been the much better option, rather than have
> individual ones. Now, that ship sailed pretty much, but that's not
> reason enough to go for XDG_BIN_HOME really. I mean, "~/.local/" is
> hardcoded as fallback prefix into the spec, so we should just accept
> that here too, and admit that making this individually configurable
> wasn't the best of ideas. I mean, making the searhc paths dynamically
> configurable using an env var by all means made sense, but the "home"
> dirs? i am not convinced...
> 
> But dunno, I am not feeling too strongly about this, but it appeared
> to me that just not doing an env var here was the best way to get this
> in quickly...

In the issue that originally motivated this, multiple people
specifically requested the ability to customize the target directory,
because their platform doesn't use ~/.local and wants to put that
somewhere else. This isn't a "maybe someone might use this someday",
this is "people specifically asked for this and intend to use it".