Re: Emacs and XDG Base Dir Spec was: persistent storage for Emacs packages

[John Yates]

I found the discussion at the bottom of this page (Thomas Koch's 2nd reference) helpful:

  https://wiki.debian.org/XDGBaseDirectorySpecification#state

Decomposing emacs' use of external storage more or less according to the enumerated criteria is simply good hygiene.  It does not means that you have to embrace the freedesktop standard.

In my own case I have already partitioned my emacs world into ~/emacs/ (a non-hidden directory containing elements I manage via github) and ~/.emacs.d/ (everything recreatable).  In particular, with the advent of better package management I put all downloaded packages beneath ~/.emacs.d/, on the theory that they can be recreated via download.  By contrast I put the configuration for those packages in ~/emacs/.

/john

On Mon, Oct 21, 2013 at 8:58 AM, Stefan Monnier <address@hidden> wrote:

> The freedesktop standards tend to come and go and change quite a bit.
> Are we contemplating this "standard" for non-freedesktop systems also?

We could work our way slowly in that direction.

Currently ~/.emacs.d is pretty messy, so it might be good to try and
"clean it up", and along the way, we could try and integrate some of
XDG's suggestions.  Not sure how much of XDG would be useful, tho.

E.g. we could start with a ~/.emacs.d/cache/ directory where all the
files that can be reconstructed would go.  Tho there aren't many such
files, IIRC.

But w.r.t "config vs data" this distinction is far from clear.

Still, we have the problem with ~/.emacs.d that many users put their
elisp packages in there and then add it to their load-path.  I think
we should at least try and detect this usage and emit a warning (but
we shouldn't just say "don't do that", so we need to agree on
a recommendation of where to put those packages).


        Stefan