Comment by matheusmoreira | Hacker News Reader

Comment by matheusmoreira | Hacker News Reader

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> There's no excuses for these programs not respecting standards that are 1. Well established by the time the software was written and 2. short

This isn't a standard, it's a convention at best. A freedesktop.org specification. Basically a scheme Red Hat people thought up and implemented widely in the open source software projects they control. It may be a useful abstraction but there's absolutely no obligation to conform to it. There doesn't have to be an "excuse" or any form of justification at all. "I just don't like it" is enough. I don't like those unsightly XDG variables either and it's entirely within my power as a software developer to trash the entire concept of XDG and do things in any way I see fit.

https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Specifications/

> freedesktop.org produces specifications for interoperability, but we are not an official standards body.

> There is no requirement for projects to implement all of these specifications, nor certification.

> This isn't a standard, it's a convention at best.

So is, like, basically all of userland in a UNIX system. Maybe we need to start looking at that as a problem instead of an excuse.

It is within your power as a developer to delete the user's home directory if you want to as well, that doesn't mean you should do it!

This is the world of Unix, there's very little obligation to do anything other than convention. That's technically true, just like you can write your software to ignore all signals, or write your software such that it assumes it's always run as root for your convenience. That may be more convenient for you the developer, it's true.

But those are all generally poor ways to write software, and a great way to get your users to complain. So it is with ignoring XDG.

To put configs in ~/.program is the convention I learned, not ~/.config/. That came later, and I see 0 reason to pick it up. It's an annoying new hierarchy which I don't even like as a user, so I certainly wouldn't follow it as a developer.

If the programs in question implement the XDG base directory spec properly, then putting `export XDG_CONFIG_HOME=$HOME/.program` in your .profile will make them put config files in .program, not .config.

Charming idea :) I'm not actually that annoyed that I will set XDG_CONFIG_HOME to $HOME, but I'll keep it in mind.

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