[PATCH 0/2] XDG basedir bin dirs

[Josh Triplett]

On Wed, May 02, 2018 at 09:52:44PM +0200, Lennart Poettering wrote:
> Well, it's fine if people use different install prefixes. The question
> though is if the xdg basedir spec really needs to care too much about
> that. I mean, what matters really is that the XDG basedir spec defines
> *search* paths env vars where we previously had none. The *home* paths
> otoh are a different story, for them the extra configurability is
> entirely unnecessary as I see it, as your app can drop stuff wherever
> you want as long as there's a way to register that in the various
> search paths. And when you place the stuff at arbitrary places, then
> you probably should configure that through a prefix, not through the
> individual home dirs of each individual concept...

I don't have any objection to configuring this via an $XDG_PREFIX
instead, defaulting to ~/.local, and then saying the binary directory is
$XDG_PREFIX/bin.

> However, I really don't see the benefit of adding individual
> configurability for each of the home dirs, because you should already
> have that anyway though the prefix dir you use when configuring your
> package...

This would provide a standardized way to *configure* that prefix,
because not all the world's a ./configure --prefix. The motivating use
case for this, for instance, was Rust's Cargo package manager, which
would like to have a sensible default for where `cargo install` should
install binaries.