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Re: XDG Standard is not evil (was: Re: Why focus on systemd?)





Le 28.11.2014 15:32, Rusi Mody a écrit :
However there are some issues: if the software-versions in these
dont match up then its precisely these XDG files that tread on
each others'
toes across OSes.

Well... if configuration files are not both upward and downward compatible between different versions, which could be both major, minor, Ubuntuesque or googlesque (yes, I do think that Ubuntu and chrome/firefox version schemes are stupid) I do not see where is the problem. After all, why, in the first time, do you need on the same computer different versions of the same software, if not for testing/development purposes? And in those purposes, you probably know how to change the default directory, right? On correct softwares, there is a command-line option for that, like -c, --config, or sometimes -C.

No issue for me here but...

One solution that Ive been toying with is as follows:
1. Have one real My-home partition
2. Keep /home as part of the OS-file system, so that
each OS can mess around with its own 'XDG's'

I wonder if people have tried this (or something similar) and
any downsides

Here, you know, you could be smarter. XDG directories are defined by environment variables. So, why not using, for example, in you .profile, something like this:

====================
$cat ~/.profile

#!/bin/sh
case $( grep PRETTY_NAME /etc/os-release |cut -f2 -d'"' ) in
"Debian GNU/Linux jessie/sid")
    XDG_FOOBAR_STUFF="~/.config/jessie"
*)
    echo "hey, I have no idea what distro this is?"
esac
====================

But, of course, it won't work with, for example, vim, bash, and plenty of softwares which... DO NOT respect XDG things. Oh, and I used /etc/os-release, which is not always present because... it's a part of XDG, AFAIK. But, you can do this by grepping/sedding in some mount on labels or whatever trick you want to identify the system on which you actually are.

This is clean, and efficient. Far better that what you could achieve *without* XDG.

Yes, I like xdg, between other reasons because it does not impose things: good softwares (for example, i3) allows the user to choose, if he want or not to use XDG.


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