basedir spec

[Carl Worth]

On Sep 4, Jaap Karssenberg wrote:
 > Following the spec both 'XDG_DATA_HOME' and 'XDG_DATA_DIRS' are searched
 > by some app. Now if I want to force the app to search just _one_ dir I
 > set 'XDG_DATA_HOME' to that directory, now my dir _and_ the default dirs
 > for 'XDG_DATA_DIRS' are searched. If I could set 'XDG_DATA_DIRS' to an
 > empty string, I would be sure only my dir is searched, but the spec
 > prohibits this by specifying that the default should also be used for
 > "set but empty" vars.

What's the motivation for the two separate variables? Since the
variables can accept a list of values, it seems that the desired
control could be achieved much more simply by just having a single
variable.

Unless I'm missing something... (in which case perhaps the
specification could use a little more language to fill the hole).

-Carl

-- 
Carl Worth                                        
USC Information Sciences Institute                      cworth at isi.edu