Comment by PunchyHamster
1 day ago
Well, they are supposed to be all in .config, problem is many app developers think they are special little boys that deserve its own directory
1 day ago
Well, they are supposed to be all in .config, problem is many app developers think they are special little boys that deserve its own directory
Most modern software uses .config, and I suspect the holdouts are due to cross-platform support issues. Windows may have it's own equivalents, but they are radically different from Unix. Developers may not want to deal with those differences, or don't want to deal with the support issues related to those differences.
The remaining holdouts tend to be very old applications. (The XDG standards are less than 25 years old, then you have to give time for them to be adopted.) For some of those applications, it would create support issues even if it would be trivial to implement. For others, it would create issues since other software would have to be modified to reflect the changes. For others, the software did not have a distinct configuration directory so untangling it would be a major effort.
In the case of the latter, just look at Firefox. Yes, it recently moved the .mozilla directory to .config. It is in no way reflective of the XDG standards. Among other things, there are log files, cache files, and add-ons in there. In my mind, that is worse than having ~/.mozilla. Instead of having a directory that can be cleanly backed up, with the exceptions being elsewhere, I am left having to sort through everything. I don't blame Firefox for taking that approach though: users were demanding a clean home directory and the developers had legacy code to deal with. They simply took the path of least resistance. (That said, Firefox isn't the only culprit here.)
%LOCALAPPDATA% on Windows. Or better still, use GetAppContainerFolderPath or SHGetKnownFolderPath with FOLDERID_LocalAppData.
I don't know if anyone is actually using roaming profiles, but config should go into the %APPDATA% folder to support that. %LOCALAPPDATA% is for things that shouldn't be synced to different machines, such as caches.
I know we used to use them in our corporate environment. Not sure if we still do, or if they gave up and called OneDrive “good enough”.
It all sounds so easy, until you learn about the XDG Base Directory Specification[1]. You're actually supposed to do a whole song and dance around a hierarchical set of environment variables, associated defaults, and resolution orders.
Interfacing with people is never easy.
[1]: https://specifications.freedesktop.org/basedir/latest/
No. Actually, it's easy. Just check for directory env or use a fallback. For example here's how you'd do this in bash:
XDG_*_DIRS are a bit more complicated, but nothing that can't be solved with a simple for-loop in any modern programming language.