inamerrata

Inspired mostly by Joey’s nonchalant way of dealing with the death of his laptop…

This seems less of a disaster than other times a laptop’s disk has died on me. When did it start to become routine? […] My mr and etckeeper setup made it easy to check everything back out from revision control. […]

…I’ve been looking at getting all my stuff version controlled too. I’ve just gotten round to checking all my dotfiles into git, and it crossed my mind that it’d be nice if I could just set an environment variable to tell apps to create their random new dot-files directly in my “.etc-garbage” repo. I figured using “$USER_ETC/foo” instead of “$HOME/.foo” would be pretty easy, and might be a fun release goal that other Debian folks might be interested in, so I did a quick google to see if something similar had already been suggested.

The first thing I stumbled upon was a mail from the PLD Linux folks who apparently were using $HOME_ETC at one time which sounded pretty good, though it doesn’t seem to have gotten anywhere. That thread included a pointer to the system that has gotten somewhere which is the XDG spec.

It’s actually pretty good, if you don’t mind it being ugly as all hell.

They define three classes of directory — configuration stuff, non-essential/cached data, and other data. That more or less matches the /etc, /var/cache and /var/lib directories for the system-wide equivalents, though if the “other data” is stuff that can be distributed by the OS vendor it might go in /usr/lib or /usr/share (or the /usr/local/ equivalents) too.

Which is all well and good. Where it gets ugly is the naming.

For the “/etc” configuration stuff, we have the environment variable $XDG_CONFIG_HOME, which defaults to ~/.config, and has a backup path defined by $XDG_CONFIG_DIRS, which defaults to /etc/xdg.

For the “/var/lib” other data stuff, we have the environment variable $XDG_DATA_HOME, which defaults to ~/.local/share, and has a backup path defined by $XDG_DATA_DIRS, which defaults to /usr/local/share:/usr/share. (Though if you’re using gdm, it’ll get set for you to also include /usr/share/gdm)

And for the “/var/cache” stuff, we have the environment variable $XDG_CACHE_HOME, which defaults to ~/.cache.

That seems to me like exactly the right idea, with way too much crap on it. If you simplify it obsessively — using existing names, dropping the desktop-centrism, you end up with:

Put configuration files in $HOME_ETC/foo or $HOME/.foo. For shared/fallback configuration, search $PATH_ETC if it’s set, or just /etc if it’s not.

Put data files in $HOME_LIB/foo or $HOME/.foo. For shared data, search $PATH_LIB if it’s set, or look through /var/lib, /usr/local/{lib,share} and /usr/{lib,share} if it’s not.

Put caches in $HOME_CACHE/foo or $HOME/.foo. For shared caches, search $PATH_CACHE if it’s set, or just look in /var/cache if it’s not.

That seems much simpler to me to the point of being self-explanatory, and much more in keeping with traditional Unix style. It’s also backwards compatabile if you use both old and new versions of a program with the same home directory (or you happen to like dotfiles). And having the XDG variables set based on the above seems pretty easy too.

I wonder what other people think — does {HOME,PATH}_{ETC,LIB,CACHE} seem sensible, or is XDG_{CONFIG,DATA,CACHE}_{HOME,DIRS} already entrenched enough that it’s best just to accept what’s fated?