Probably the most useful thing to me about the XDG based directories are the HOME directories which offer a good solution to cleansing out home directories of the overwhelming quantity of .dot files.
Unfortunately, adoption of the XDG HOME base directories seems to be rather marginal. Distro developers, desktop environments and a few other are clearly on board, but the rest of developers seem indifferent or uncertain at best, if they even know about XDG. I have thought about the idea that perhaps instead XDG should adopt a "convention over configuration" approach. For instance, make $XDG_CONFIG_HOME always and only `$HOME/.config`. That way developers can target that specific directory without worry about looking up the environment variable setting. Users can still customize the location by symbolic-link to `~/.config` from whatever directory they prefer. For the environment settings that can have more than one path, it seems to me it's about time file systems really supported directory unions. Some already do. And with that in place, XDG could again have a single fixed location as the conventional target, but distro creators and end-users could make it a union of directories as desired. I think the idea of XDG base directories is a very useful and important contribution that ultimately should make it's way into FHS proper, but it my take this kind of conventional approach to really propel it forward. In the meantime, as I have seen very little progress in uptake of the XDG HOME directories over that last few years I have all but abandoned any hope that it will change. And I have moved all my personal files out of $HOME and into $HOME/Desktop so I no long have to weed through hidden directories (when a given directory browser isn't designed or set to hide them). _______________________________________________ xdg mailing list [email protected] http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/xdg
