[GNC-dev] About the "$HOME/.local" installation prefix

[Geert Janssens]

Our current wiki on building gnucash for Ubuntu 16.04 (https://
wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/BuildUbuntu16.04) suggests $HOME/.local as a valid 
installation prefix.

While checking for another thread I have found this to be problematic.

In particular when using this installation prefix, a number of files and 
directories will be added in $HOME/.local/share/. That directory however is 
also to primary directory where a running applications store their runtime 
data. So the same directory is being used as installation directory and data 
directory.

That makes it pretty difficult to quickly remove the local gnucash 
installation in one go as the installation directory may also hold runtime 
data (and from more than one application!).

So personally I would recommend against using $HOME/.local as installation 
prefix. I am however curious where this suggestion originally came from.

Regards,

Geert