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

[Tommy Trussell]

On Thu, May 2, 2019 at 6:02 AM Geert Janssens <geert.gnucash at kobaltwit.be>
wrote:

> 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.
>
...

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

This is entirely speculation... I'm looking at this system where I've been
testing the GnuCash versions available as Snap and Flatpak... and I see
that the Flatpak installation apparently added
~/.local/share/flatpak/exports/share to the $XDG_DATA_DIRS environment
variable.

Maybe whoever wrote the wiki entry was also working with Flatpak and
thought .local would be a good place to stash things to make them more
accessible to Flatpak.

I would think ~/bin would be a more ideal suggestion because I see it is
already defined in my bash $PATH on this Ubuntu machine. (And I'm pretty
sure I didn't add it, though I may have.)