[aquaria] What about using Freedesktop config-spec ? (Patch included)

Thomas W. Most twm at freecog.net
Fri Apr 22 00:51:54 EDT 2011


On Thu, Apr 21, 2011 at 10:03 PM, Ryan C. Gordon <icculus at icculus.org> wrote:
> On 4/21/11 6:58 PM, Julien Humbert wrote:
>> Hello everyone !
>>
>> Aquaria uses ATM the « ~/.Aquaria » config directory, and I think it
>> is a bad practice. $HOME is cluttered with many « ~/.something » files
>> and dirs. Freedesktop has a spec for this. Apps should use « ~/.config
>> » for user config files and « ~/.local/share » for user data.
>
> Mac OS X has the same sort of split (~/Library/Preferences and ~/Library/Application Support), but I think separating the files is counterproductive, so it all goes under Application Support on the Mac.
>
> I agree having the ~/.Aquaria directory is undesirable, and it's only there for the sake of Unix legacy. Would there be a lot of complaints, though, if we settled on ~/.local/share/Aquaria for everything?

I disagree about the separation.  In general, the point of separating
them is that things in ~/.config can be blown away without loosing
user data, while stuff in ~/.local/share can be treated as more
precious.  In Aquaria's particular case, it is nice to separate them
because the user settings include machine-specific stuff like screen
resolution.  In contrast, data like saved games would be useful to
synchronize between machines, and this is made easier by segregation.

Regardless, if we mean to implement the XDG spec properly then we'll
need to check the $XDG_DATA_HOME and $XDG_CONFIG_HOME environment
variables, using "~/.local/share" and "~/.config" as their default
values, as defined in the spec [1].

--Tom

[1]: http://standards.freedesktop.org/basedir-spec/basedir-spec-latest.html


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