[PATCH 0/2] XDG basedir bin dirs

[Josh Triplett]

On Wed, May 02, 2018 at 09:42:44PM +0200, Lennart Poettering wrote:
> On Mi, 02.05.18 21:13, Lennart Poettering (mzkqt at 0pointer.de) wrote:
> 
> > 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...
> 
> So here's a strong reason for not having XDG_BIN_HOME: because $PATH
> is not designed to refer to other env vars, it expects literal
> paths. After all, for XDG_DATA_DIRS (and similar for the other search
> path env vars) the basedir spec says that you need to search in both
> XDG_DATA_DIRS and XDG_DATA_HOME, i.e. both variables are independent
> of each other. But this is not how $PATH works: the variable is
> implemented and respected all over the place, but what isn't listed in
> it doesn't matter, hence we can define XDG_BIN_HOME as much as we
> want, nobody would care, it would never be consulted.

Tools that install binaries can and should consult it, and I'd like to
see those tools not hardcoding ~/.local/bin.

If someone sets $XDG_BIN_HOME, it'll be their responsibility to put the
target directory in $PATH. A distribution could, by default, add
~/.local/bin to $PATH in /etc/skel/.bashrc, and if someone wants to set
$XDG_BIN_HOME they can edit their own ~/.bashrc to do so. And for that
matter, if the distribution itself wants to set $XDG_BIN_HOME they'll
also set $PATH accordingly.

- Josh Triplett