~/.gnucash and XDG default directories

[John Ralls]

On Jan 16, 2011, at 8:41 AM, Geert Janssens wrote:

> On Sunday 16 January 2011, John Ralls wrote:
>> 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.
> 
> Oops, I mixed those up yes. g_get_user_config_dir defaults to $HOME/.config,
> g_get_user_data_dir defaults to $HOME/.local/share.
> 
> The problem with the latter is that g_get_user_data_dir on Windows is equal to 
> g_get_home_dir. So using that on Windows just doesn't change anything to what 
> we have now.
> 
>> 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.
>> 
> On my systems (currently Fedora 13 and 14) which I use as primary desktops, 
> both .config and .local/share hold data for 10-30 applications. Some are KDE 
> some are Gnome. I also know Gnome has made it a GnomeGoal to have all of its 
> applications use these directories. So at least for Gnome, this seems to be 
> the way to go in the future.
> 
>> 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.
>> 
> I presume you mean to make this change after I have made the changes to use 
> g_get_user_config_dir ?

Yes, of course.

Regards,
John Ralls