5 ms·

XDG has real practical benefits, though.

• fiddlerwoaroof 4y ago
  I personally hate the XDG directories. It’s annoying for different part of an application’s data to be split between `~/.config`, `~/.Cache`, etc. Rather than for all the data for the `foo` program to be in a file named something like `~/.foo*`
  • kragen 4y ago
    I find it useful; I might want to version-control .config but definitely not .cache. And if the program is broken I might blow away .cache but not .config.
    • fiddlerwoaroof 4y ago
      That still works if it’s `~/.foo/cache`
      • Macha 4y ago
        rm -r ~/.foo/cache ~/bar/cache ~/baz/data/app/cache [20 more apps..] is less ergonomic than rm -r ~/.cache/\*
        • Macha 4y ago
          I think HN escaped the * in that final line before I edited it into a code block and my edit window is expired so I can't fix it
        • fiddlerwoaroof 4y ago
          There’s always: rm -rf ~/.*/cache
          • Macha 4y ago
            Assumes the app uses cache as it's cache, rather than names like dlcontent, bananas_content, storage.sqlite, assets, meta, $TIMESTAMP.txt etc.
            • fiddlerwoaroof 4y ago
              Well, I don’t mind standards, I just prefer all the files an app touches to be under a single root folder (that’s not just $HOME)
  • jsmeaton 4y ago
    Asked out of ignorance, but do the envvars not allow one to easily co-locate data/config/cache by setting them all to the same value?
    • fiddlerwoaroof 4y ago
      Not in a way that would be useful here, I think: I prefer ~/.firefox/cache to ~/.cache/firefox and this requires the variables being unique per program (although, you could probably wrap each program with a script that sets the relevant environment variables to achieve this effect)
      • jsmeaton 4y ago
        I was thinking along the lines of ~/.data/{prog} without requiring further subdirs. The config, data, and cache would all coexist within the same directory per program Each of the data, config, and cache envvars would all be set to ~/.data in this setup (though “data” isn’t a name I’d use)
  • codedokode 4y ago
    It is convenient because you can delete ~/.cache any time without losing configuration files.