~/.gnucash and XDG default directories

[Jeff Kletsky]

I'm a Product Manager by day...

 From my perspective, changing the location of the preference files on 
Unix-like platforms doesn't provide significant value either to the end 
user or to making the code more accessible to prospective developers.

I'd much rather see development time go into things that provide more 
tangible benefit.



On 01/16/2011 09:12 AM, Geert Janssens wrote:
> Thanks for your feedback.
>
> On Sunday 16 January 2011, Jeff Kletsky wrote:
>> In my opinion, adopting a "standard" that
>>
>> * goes counter to long-established practice
>>
>  From what I've read is serves a different target audience. The XDG base
> specification was created to cater for a new breed of users: ordinary desktop
> users that don't know/care about config files or user specific application
> data. As such the intended target applications for this spec are desktop
> applications. I think GnuCash falls into that category. The long-established
> practice still holds as far as I'm concerned for anything more power user
> (things like mutt, lynx, vi, emacs,...).
>
>> * isn't widely accepted
>>
> This is mostly a chicken-and-egg problem. Not adopting a new standard because
> it's not widely accepted will never get it widely accepted.
>
>> will cause more problems than it is worth.
>>
>>
>> There is a significant documentation change cost for GNUCash.
>>
> 6 lines in the Help Manual and Concepts Guide combined
> 7 comment lines in the code
> A number of entries in the wiki
> What did I miss ?
>
>> There is a significant coding/test cost (either auto-upgrade, or
>> checking two locations, and possibly having both present)
>>
> There are examples that can be reused. Rhythmbox has implemented a silent
> migration, Comix does a migration after asking the user.
>> There is a significant support cost ("Where are the config files? They
>> aren't where everything else is.")
>>
> Again the chicken and egg issue. As more GUI apps start using the XDG
> standard, the config files will be in the expected location.
>> As far as I can tell, there is nothing that I use on FreeBSD that uses
>> ~/.local/share (they are very adamant about non-base applications
>> installing system-wide data into /usr/local/etc, not letting everything
>> throw into crap into /etc) and on Ubuntu, only webkit's icons and
>> gvfs-metadata are found there.
>>
> As far as I can see, you are mixing things up here. The choice between /etc or
> /usr/local/etc has nothing to do with the user. Both are for system wide
> preferences. Moving from $HOME/.<appname>  to .local/share or .config (thanks
> John for pointing that out) is for user specific data generated by the
> application.
>
> I see more and more applications that start to adhere to this specification.
> There is a proposed GnomeGoal as well, though it's not approved yet.
> Considering Gnome is part of the Freedesktop platform (as is KDE and Qt) I
> expect them to come through with the spec at some point.
>
> But I also see this spec stirs up a lot of discussion so probably it's best to
> let the dust settle before we make our final decision. There's no hurry. I
> didn't intend to make these changes before 2.6 anyway.
>
>> On Mac, things generally go into ~/Library/Application Support (though I
>> haven't read developer docs for OS X in ages).
>>
> I would expect g_get_user_config_dir or g_get_user_data_dir to return that
> path by default, but I'm afraid I don't know how glib on OS X works.
>
> Geert
>
>> Jeff
>>
>> On 01/16/2011 07:19 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 ?
>>>
>>> Geert
>>>
>>> [1] see https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=503722
>>> [2] see
>>> http://standards.freedesktop.org/basedir-spec/basedir-spec-0.6.html
>>> _______________________________________________
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