Re: Paths in the default mame config file

[Cesare Falco <cesare.falco@gmail.com>]

Il 01/11/2012 10:22, Jon Dowland ha scritto:
> On Thu, Nov 01, 2012 at 01:02:38AM +0100, Cesare Falco wrote:
> > Il 31/10/2012 17:12, Simon McVittie ha scritto:
> > > If the MAME (upstream) developers are willing to handle XDG_CONFIG_HOME
> > > according to the XDG Base Directory specification, great. If not, I
> > Unfortunately, I'm afraid they're not, as Mame is now a
> > cross-platform project and this would break portability between
> > different OS's (and most developers work on Windows).
> This doesn't make sense to me. Presumably they have platform-specific code.
> Can the XDG_* handling stuff not be in that?  What breaks if different
> platforms use different directories for this stuff? Most Windows programs use
> %USERPROFILE%/AppData or something of that ilk.  Obviously that won't work on
> Linux.
I see your point, however on Windows Mame uses mame.ini in the
current directory (or another place supplied with a command line
switch) to manage all search paths.

This is a good choice IMO. Nearly nothing about configuration is
hardcoded and it also helps make things plain for the user.

Much effort has been put in minimizing platform-specific code to
ease maintainance. I guess diverging configuration files handling
would not even be considered by the Mame Team. ;)

So, if we can't tweak mame.ini using the XDG_* variable set,
my personal preference would be reverting to ~/.mame/

Cheers,
Cesare.