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The XDG approach is over-engineered: it adds complexity and provides no benefit. What is the specific concrete advantage of putting some parts of foo's state in
by quotemstr 8y ago
The XDG approach is over-engineered: it adds complexity and provides no benefit. What is the specific concrete advantage of putting some parts of foo's state in ~/.config/foo, some in ~/.local, and so on? All this approach does is scatter what's conceptually a single state blob across different parts of the filesystem. I dealt with this stuff in Windows for years, and we don't need it in the Unix world.
The conventional dotfile approach is just fine: there's an application and it puts state under a directory named after itself.
- pseudalopex 8y agoXDG just extends the traditional Unix approach to home directories. $XDG_CONFIG_HOME is equivalent to /etc. It has small files you probably want to back up. $XDG_DATA_HOME is equivalent to /var. It has potentially large files you might want to back up. $XDG_CACHE_HOME is equivalent to /var/cache. It has potentially large files you probably don't want to back up. You can delete them if you need space.