Bug 821565

What is planned about FreeDesktop.org Base directory specification for rpm?

http://ploum.net/post/207-modify-your-application-to-use-xdg-folders
https://live.gnome.org/GnomeGoals/XDGConfigFolders
http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Specifications/basedir-spec

I'm not terribly keen on invalidating 10+ years of documentation and community knowledge by moving the per-user rpm configuration to appease GNOME agendas, especially as rpm is most certainly NOT a "desktop application".

Why not do it like Git did?

Git will first try to read ~/.config/git/config, then ~/.gitconfig if the former doesn't exist.

They didn't break any community-knowledge nor documentation, because the old path still works just as well.

You are still trying to mix desktop-focused specification with configuration of low-level tool that desktop user will use only minimally. I don't think that's a good idea. Furthermore I don't see any real gain in this change neither on server nor on desktop.

The XDG specs are not only for desktop stuff, they are for user data and configuration.

As a Fedora packager, I am a user of rpm, so files like ~/.rpmmacros are user configuration.

And there are real gains to the migration.

One of them is that of backups: currently, I would have to backup every single dot file in my home folder if I wanted to preserve my user configuration. Moving to XDG folders, I can backup only .config (and .local for user data).

That means I will not forget to add a new dot file to my backups when I start using new software.

Some other advantages were given in the first link Eric provided in comment 1.

There's no "if foo doesn't exist then read bar" logic in rpm's configuration system, everything in the macro path is read inclusively in the specified order if they exist. So if both ~/.rpmmacros and eg ~/.config/rpmmacros exist one will take precedense and if the contents differ you'll get confused users for little added value.

Another problem is that you can't rely on eg $XDG_CONFIG_HOME and such being set, so properly supporting the XDG spec would require extra logic over the current simple "macro path" to handle the cases where its set and falling back to default ~/.config/ if not.

In other words, it requires adding extra complexity to rpm's configuration system AND dealing with the consequent migration pains for the next 5-10 years.

Mind you, I'm not adverse to the idea of centralized configuration in ~/.config/, which is why I haven't closed this WONTFIX by now. It's more a question of waiting for the right opportunity, such as other events/enhancements suddenly making supporting the XDG directory spec more desireable/feasible.

Oh and BTW, "forgetting to add a new dot file to backups" is IMO an entirely backwards approach. For backups you'll want everything that's not *excluded*. 

There's really a snowball's chance in hell that all software ever written will be "fixed" to comply with XDG, so you can really never stop backing up all the dotfiles. Its far more productive to try to get the worst offenders to place their disposable data info a known exclude-location, such as browsers putting their cached data into XDG cache which can be easily excluded.

Full specification can be found at: 
http://standards.freedesktop.org/basedir-spec/latest/

The Freedesktop.org XDG base directory specification have good de facto adoption.
It has been adopted by:
- GNOME ( https://live.gnome.org/GnomeGoals/XDGConfigFolders )
- GTK+ ( https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=646631 )
- KDE ( http://techbase.kde.org/KDE_System_Administration/XDG_Filesystem_Hierarchy#Freedesktop.org_and_Standard_Directories )
- QT ( http://harmattan-dev.nokia.com/docs/library/html/qt4/qsettings.html#setPath )
- XFCE ( http://docs.xfce.org/xfce/xfce4-session/advanced in Files and Environment Variables )
- LXDE
- Razor-qt
- VLC ( https://trac.videolan.org/vlc/ticket/1267 )
- GStreamer ( https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=518597 )
- Chrome ( http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=16976 )
- many more upstream applications
- Ubuntu ( http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/6557/ & http://packages.ubuntu.com/fr/source/precise/libxdg-basedir )
- Debian ( http://packages.debian.org/squeeze/libxdg-basedir1 )
- Red Hat
- Fedora
- Suse
- many more distributions

I think that @APPNAME@ should use same locations than the vast majority of Desktop environment and applications.


There are real advantages of following this specification :
- a lot less cluttered $HOME
- Make backups a lot more safer and easier.
  Backuping your $XDG_DATA_HOME along with your files is enough 
  (or just excluding $XDG_CACHE_HOME)
- A lot easier to reset a default configuration if you want/need it (and 
  without any risk to loose informations). Even for the software itself 
  could choose to reset $XDG_CONFIG_HOME if needed.
- Avoid some strange bugs that happens because you had a old version of 
  some configuration file
- A lot more of flexibility and portability because no path are hardcoded.

Automated advertisement spam for a specification? That's a new one... but just as annoying as any spam. If anything, such spam is going to make me LESS likely to do the damnest thing about this. Dont do it again.

This was not a spam

This bug appears to have been reported against 'rawhide' during the Fedora 19 development cycle.
Changing version to '19'.

(As we did not run this process for some time, it could affect also pre-Fedora 19 development
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