On Thu, 06.11.14 11:28, Rahul Sundaram (metherid(a)gmail.com) wrote:
Hi
This is request for the WG members to vote on requiring all defaults
apps/components in the workstation installation be compliant with the xdg
base dir spec.
Rationale:
This is more or less the current status already with very few but high
profile components including Firefox and NSS. They could be grandfathered
in for now with a time limit for them to be compliant. If more apps were
compliant with the spec, it helps in maintenance of the system, especially
backups. It would also help convince upstreams to take this spec more
seriously if a major distribution requires it.
Prior discussions at
https://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/desktop/2014-October/010979.html
So there's the general problem that the XDG basedir spec has
issues. I find it quite understandable that Mozilla is not following
this, because the spec is not particularly useful in many ways. It's
also a bit too complicated, and the packages which do use it, tend to
use it in ways that are really off. For example, they keep writing to
~/.local even though that's probably more a place to place resources
in that never change after being written.
The spec never defined a directory for "state", even though many apps
need that, which frequently had the effect that apps would place that
state in ~/.local, instead...
From the systemd side we tried to clean this up, and give a good
recommendation on how this really should look like. We should probably
get the XDG basedir spec updated accordingly, but I figure there will
be some opposition to that, since it was too vague before and
everybody found his own interpretation.
The systemd document about this you find here:
http://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/file-hierarchy.html#Home%...
While I sympathize with the idea of mandating that apps in the default
Fedora install make use of this, we really should get the spec in
order before.
Lennart
--
Lennart Poettering, Red Hat