On Fri, Dec 20, 2013 at 5:07 PM, Ingo Ruhnke <[email protected]> wrote: > On Fri, Dec 20, 2013 at 4:10 PM, Rex Dieter <[email protected]> wrote: >> >> Why should games be treated differently that other applications? Ie, why >> not just put stuff under $XDG_DATA_HOME ? > > > While I have seen a few games using $XDG_DATA_HOME for savegames it feels > like the wrong place for them. As far as I understand XDG_DATA_HOME (the > standard really isn't all that clear on what it's actually meant to be used > for), it's basically just the user's version of /usr/share/, meaning it > might contain themes, add-ons, mods, icons and other third party program > data. Savegames on the other side are your personal data, so you really > don't want to get it mixed together with third-party stuff. > > So at the moment I would store them together with the config data, as that's > the kind of data you want to backup. It's also matches best what games do > under Windows where you have a singe directory for the games itself and then > a ~/MyGames/ directory for config, savegames and screenshots. The problem > with this is that savegames aren't exactly like config, config tends to be > small, while gamesaves can go into the Gigabytes depending on the game, with > screenshots or video recording the situation might even get more bloaty. But > as games save all those files automatically without a file dialog they need > a default location of where to store them. > > I am not sure that a XDG_GAME_HOME is needed, as the damage done by > spreading things out further could be more harmful then just stuffing > everything into XDG_CONFIG_HOME, but there is plenty of precedence for games > specific location, namely /var/games/, /usr/share/games, /usr/games and so > on.
That precedent alone is imho reason enough for $XDG_GAMES_HOME. I'm conflicted myself about it, don't get me wrong. But in the end, games managers (Wine's Windows games api, Steam, ...) will create a location of their own for this stuff. Might as well try to catch this one as early as possible. > > -- > Blog: http://grumbel.blogspot.com/ > JabberID: xmpp:[email protected] > ICQ: 59461927 > > _______________________________________________ > xdg mailing list > [email protected] > http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/xdg > _______________________________________________ xdg mailing list [email protected] http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/xdg
