~/.gnucash and XDG default directories

[John Ralls]

On Jan 16, 2011, at 7:19 AM, Geert Janssens wrote:

> Historically, GnuCash has always stored its user specific application data in 
> ~/.gnucash based on old linux (unix ?) conventions.
> 
> This didn't work really well on Mac OS X/Quartz, so John has overridden this 
> path on OS X to make more sense there.
> 
> Now there's a bugreport that indicates this isn't the best place on Windows 
> either [1].
> 
> I could override the path on Windows as well and be done with it, but in my 
> investigation I found that even on linux ~/.<appname> is no longer the 
> recommended place to store such information.
> 
> According to the XDG Base Directory Specification [2] the preferred location 
> is ~/.local/share/<appname>.
> 
> The nice thing is, glib has a convenience function g_get_user_config_dir, 
> which by default returns ~/.local/share on linux and the equivalent and proper 
> ~\Application Data (Windows XP) or ~\AppData\Roaming (Windows Vista/7).
> 
> I don't know what this routine returns on OS X, but I would expect it to 
> return the proper location for user specific application data there as well. 
> If not that should be reported as a bug againse glib on OS X.
> 
> In this light I would like to update the GnuCash code to make use of the 
> g_get_user_data_dir function on all platforms and rename the directory from 
> .gnucash to gnucash. That would give a better experience on all platforms IMO.
> This is what the directories would become:
> - Linux: ~/.local/share/gnucash
> - Windows XP: c:\Documents and Settings\<user>\Application Data\gnucash
> - Windows Vista/7: c:\Documents and Settings\<user>\AppData\Roaming\gnucash
> - OS X: ?
> 
> I would obviously have to provide some conversion code as well, that would 
> copy the old .gnucash contents to .local/share/gnucash to guarantee continuity 
> for the users.
> 
> I also think this change may be better for 2.5/2.6 than 2.4.1.
> 
> Does anyone have any objections to this ?

You must have $XDG_CONFIG_HOME set on your Linux system. If that's not set, then g_get_user_config_dir returns $HOME/.config., which if everyone used it would be an improvement over littering $HOME with hidden directories. Not everybody uses it, though. In fact, on my Debian Lenny VM, ~/.local/share contains one subdirectory, "Trash", and  ~/.config contains two, "gtk+-2.0" and "enchant". AQBanking and GConf each have their own hidden directories. Admittedly, I have that VM set up with KDE, and I use it only for development so there aren't a lot of applications on it. 

I think it makes more sense to lift get_special_folder(int) from glib/gutils.c, use that to set the directory on win32, and to leave the rest alone... but the change is mostly harmless (you'll need to look for ~/.gnucash and copy it over, and maybe ask the user if she wants to delete the old location), so if you really want to do it I have no objections. I'll just change GNC_DOT_DIR to XDG_CONFIG_HOME in the OSX launcher script.

Regards,
John Ralls