Re: [Nano-devel] proposal to add support for the XDG base directory spec

[Brand Huntsman]

On Sat, 7 Oct 2017 18:11:25 +0200
Benno Schulenberg <address@hidden> wrote:

> That is stretching the meaning of "config file".  Past search strings
> and cursor positions and executed commands are not configuration,
> they are entirely comparable to the recently-used things in other
> programs.  That's why my first idea was to put them in
> $XDG_CACHE_HOME.  They are non-essential data files -- no real harm
> is done when they are lost, but... it *would* be a nuisance.  So they
> are not cache, they are not config, so they must be data: data that
> the program produces and wants to keep for later reference.

~/.cache/ should have been ~/.tmp/, ~/.config/ should have been ~/.etc/, 
~/.local/share/ should have been ~/.local-share/ or something else besides a 
useless nested directory and there should have been a fourth directory for 
state, ~/.var/ or something. XDG could have been a lot nicer but it isn't, so 
we are forced to adapt.

XDG_CONFIG_HOME is the best choice unless you want to interpret XDG_DATA_HOME 
as static or state like gnome and gtk do for recently used history.


> That would have been an interesting mechanism: that the user doesn't
> need to redefine a syntax that has been included by /etc/nanorc but
> that she can simply override the reading of
> a /usr/share/nano/xxx.nanorc file by putting an xxx.nanorc file in
> $XDG_DATA_HOME.
> 
> But... for nano, those nanorc files in /usr/share/nano are
> configuration files.  They are example files that the user can copy
> and edit to suit their color tastes.  So what the XDG spec calls DATA
> is used by nano to store CONFIG stuff.  :|

The syntaxes in /usr/share/nano/ are no different than the png files in 
/usr/share/icons/, both are static data used directly by the program or 
settings in some config file. /etc/gtk-3.0/settings.ini references a directory 
in /usr/share/icons/, that doesn't make the icons config stuff.

A user can copy the syntaxes or png files to ~/.local/share/(nano/icons)/ and 
modify to re-theme their system.