[PATCH 0/2] XDG basedir bin dirs

[elektra at markus-raab.org]

Hi,

I agree with Lennart it is not a good choice to just throw env vars onto
everything. But I disagree that "best way to get this in quickly..." is
something we should use as argument.

About the patch:
"at an appropriate place" does not add anything useful, remove it or
suggest something concrete.

2018-05-02 Josh Triplett wrote:
> This isn't a "maybe someone might use this someday",
> this is "people specifically asked for this and intend to use it".

Please cite. I would be interested who the people are and what they want
to do with it.

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.

I would not make this configurable, unless there is a good use case for
it. The search path (PATH) is the relevant place. Having multiple places
to configure the same path only brings inconsistencies.

If you want such a prefix nevertheless, XDG_LOCAL might be a better
name. Imho the name XDG_PREFIX is too generic.

>> 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.

XDG_LOCAL or XDG_BIN_DIRS would not help here at all. If the software
does not support --prefix it won't support XDG_LOCAL or XDG_BIN_DIRS.
PATH does help here.

The argument for XDG_LOCAL or XDG_BIN_DIRS would be that these env vars
could be used to drop binaries to.  But, as I understand it, it is not
the responsibility of XDG to provide build/install configuration.

best regards,
-- 
Markus Raab          http://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/raab/
TU Wien                   markus.raab at complang.tuwien.ac.at
Compilers and Languages          Phone: (+431) 58801/185185
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