5 ms·

Why not _shame_ openssh? Or vim? Or emacs? I would advise not calling for shame on any of these projects because they have a pattern to support that has been in

Why not _shame_ openssh? Or vim? Or emacs? I would advise not calling for shame on any of these projects because they have a pattern to support that has been in place longer than the XDG standard has been in place. You can change gnupg's home dir, but it would break a lot of currently functional setups if it just moved.

fxfan 8y ago
I guess I was being nice to old programs. Also, these are programs that a lot of external tools interact with. Nobody cares about where firefox stores its data- except the now almost dead flash plugin.
- kondor6c 8y ago
  Yes, very good point I do think that the older programs/projects have to plan a migration which really can be challenging. I think there are some that might care for example selenium might have the mozilla directory as a default and some might hard code it. The orchestration of such a change is difficult because I don't think too many people read changelog or really keep up with upstream modifications. Good thoughts
gnomewascool 8y ago
> You can change gnupg's home dir, but it would break a lot of currently functional setups if it just moved. You can just change the default: if .gnupg exists, write everything to it. If not, write to $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/gnupg/ and $XDG_DATA_HOME/gnupg/ as appropriate (deciding how to carry out the split is not obvious, but can be done). I agree, though, that calling it "shaming" is neither justified, nor useful.
- afiori 8y ago
  > (deciding how to carry out the split is not obvious, but can be done). For this reason I like better the windows distinction, that (if I understand in correctly) distinguishes between machine-dependent files and machine independent files. for something like gnupg I would not really say what is data and what is configuration
  - pseudalopex 8y ago
    It can be just as hard to say what should be local and what should be roaming.
  - fxfan 8y ago
    Is that what appdata and appdataroaming are?
yjftsjthsd-h 8y ago
I'm personally willing to give SSH a partial pass because I feel like having it separate makes it easier to reason about from a security perspective (this would also apply to GPG). For vim... yeah, AFAIK "vim" does that, but neovim uses ~/.config/nvim :) And to your general point... yes, many of these programs predate XDG. I happily support keeping them backwards compatible (which should be easy; checking multiple places in order is a time-honored tradition). But I honestly don't think this was a good idea even decades ago, and "we've always done it this way" is a terrible reason to not even support a newer, cleaner approach. Again, there's no reason to break existing systems; just support an additional location, probably make it the default, and everyone will be happy.

fxfan 8y ago

I guess I was being nice to old programs. Also, these are programs that a lot of external tools interact with. Nobody cares about where firefox stores its data- except the now almost dead flash plugin.

kondor6c 8y ago
Yes, very good point I do think that the older programs/projects have to plan a migration which really can be challenging. I think there are some that might care for example selenium might have the mozilla directory as a default and some might hard code it. The orchestration of such a change is difficult because I don't think too many people read changelog or really keep up with upstream modifications. Good thoughts

gnomewascool 8y ago

> You can change gnupg's home dir, but it would break a lot of currently functional setups if it just moved. You can just change the default: if .gnupg exists, write everything to it. If not, write to $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/gnupg/ and $XDG_DATA_HOME/gnupg/ as appropriate (deciding how to carry out the split is not obvious, but can be done). I agree, though, that calling it "shaming" is neither justified, nor useful.

afiori 8y ago
> (deciding how to carry out the split is not obvious, but can be done). For this reason I like better the windows distinction, that (if I understand in correctly) distinguishes between machine-dependent files and machine independent files. for something like gnupg I would not really say what is data and what is configuration
- pseudalopex 8y ago
  It can be just as hard to say what should be local and what should be roaming.
- fxfan 8y ago
  Is that what appdata and appdataroaming are?

yjftsjthsd-h 8y ago

I'm personally willing to give SSH a partial pass because I feel like having it separate makes it easier to reason about from a security perspective (this would also apply to GPG). For vim... yeah, AFAIK "vim" does that, but neovim uses ~/.config/nvim :) And to your general point... yes, many of these programs predate XDG. I happily support keeping them backwards compatible (which should be easy; checking multiple places in order is a time-honored tradition). But I honestly don't think this was a good idea even decades ago, and "we've always done it this way" is a terrible reason to not even support a newer, cleaner approach. Again, there's no reason to break existing systems; just support an additional location, probably make it the default, and everyone will be happy.