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From: | Paul Eggert |
Subject: | bug#583: Use XDG basedir spec for configuration files? |
Date: | Wed, 28 Aug 2019 23:22:35 -0700 |
User-agent: | Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:60.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/60.8.0 |
Glenn Morris wrote:
And it's not clear that an ELPA package's files should be considered "user specific data files" (XDG_DATA_HOME) as opposed to "user specific configuration files" (XDG_CONFIG_HOME).
It seems clear to me. They are data, not configuration. You would not install them under /etc, but somewhere like /usr/share.
If I understand correctly, ELPA packages are not really either "data" or "configuration": they're software packages. And the XDG scheme doesn't appear to be designed for installing software packages: it's designed only for user preferences (aka configuration), user data, and information cached for the user.
If ELPA packages are just local copies from a server somewhere, it seems the most plausible place for them is the XDG cache (XDG_CACHE_HOME, which is ~/.cache by default) rather than either in "data" or "configuration"; only the list of downloaded packages should be placed in XDG_CONFIG_HOME. Presumably the ELPA package manager could arrange for this.
Not being an expert in these matters, I looked at another popular packaging scheme: Flatpak. It appears to put everything under ~/.local/share, i.e., under XDG_DATA_HOME. This includes configuration. See <https://github.com/flatpak/flatpak/wiki/Filesystem>.
It's quite a mess, huh?
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