Hello, I would like to propose extending the current range of XDG_CONFIG_DIRS to support stateless operating systems.
In a stateless operating system, the /usr tree is considered to be the domain of the vendor, i.e. the OS files themselves. Files in /etc/ and /var, i.e. mutable nodes in the filesystem, are considered to be owned exclusively by the local system administrator (i.e. unix account euid 0) In order to keep these split-domains, vendor-provided files must then not violate this specification, and must instead provide files in the /usr tree (This is under the assumption of course that the Operating System no longer has a split /usr / tree.) Therefore I propose that XDG_CONFIG_DIRS is extended to also support a new vendor location: /usr/share/xdg It is also proposed on the glib bug linked below that we could extend support for "/run/xdg" also for systemd-style runtime trees. Notably, this is within the $(datadir) and *not* $(sysconfdir). It should also have a lower priority than the existing $(sysconfdir)/xdg directory, which in all cases should be respected as a local system-wide *override* to the vendor directory. Many benefits come from this approach: a less poluted /etc/ tree, a complete domain-split between OS files and local system administrator files, and no longer having to perform so-called "three-way merge" on the local $(sysconfdir) files vs the vendor-provided OS files. For the relevant glib discussion, please see: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=763539 For a larger discussion on this topic, please see: https://clearlinux.org/features/stateless This has already been implemented in the Clear Linux Project for Intel Architecture, and as such converging on a standard now that the work has been shown to work and be beneficial, would help all parties moving forward into a more stateless era. Many thanks, - Ikey Doherty _______________________________________________ xdg mailing list [email protected] https://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/xdg
