unity-design team mailing list archive

[Charles Kerr <charles@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, Mar 25, 2010 at 3:53 PM, Bastian, Waldo <waldo.bastian@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> If there is a reason to care where applications save all or part of their data (beyond the FHS), then one could write a spec that outlines where applications should put what and one could express those locations using the XDG Base Directory spec.
>
> One reason to care about file locations is if multiple independent applications need to be able to access the same information.
>
> Cheers,
> Waldo

There seems to be reasonable disagreement about how XDG models the FHS
wrt XDG_DATA_HOME.

I've had users suggest that Transmission save .torrent files to
XDG_DATA_HOME, and Mark interpreted it as a place for "data that the
app writes during the users use of it, which is not data that the user
explicitly saved somewhere (i.e. not data the user would open through
File->Open)."

On the other hand, several people at the XDG mailing list assert that
it mirrors /usr/share.  For example Thomas Leonard wrote it "should
only be written to when installing software. The user should only have
to backup CONFIG." and Mark McLoughlin wrote "editors shouldn't be
editing .desktop files by making a copy with the same file ID and
putting them in ~/.local/share/applications. $XDG_DATA_HOME, AFAICT,
is for application data, not user configuration files. To show a
concrete problem with doing it this way, if you installed a vim
package in your home directory, you'd expect the package to install
vim.desktop in ~/.local/share/applications, overriding the user's
changes.

Neither interpretation is new, and both groups of people are
well-reasoned, so perhaps the best solution would be to reduce
ambiguity in the spec.

That aside, FWIW I agree with the idea of Ubuntu getting behind a
(clarified) XDG spec.

cheers,
Charles