[GNC] XDG_CONFIG_HOME

[Fross, Michael]

Thank you Geert.  This is extremely helpful.  I appreciate you taking the
time to document all of that.  May make sense to get this into the  wiki...

For Windows, I assume there are also two directories that correspond do
~.local/share/gnucash and ~/.config/gnucash.  I'll take a look for them.

Kind regards,

Michael

On Mon, Apr 16, 2018 at 1:39 PM, Geert Janssens <geert.gnucash at kobaltwit.be>
wrote:

> Op maandag 16 april 2018 20:10:16 CEST schreef Fross, Michael:
> > Just so I'm clear:
> >
> > XDG_DATA_HOME will point to the GNC config directory on linux.
> > GNC_DATA_HOME will do likewise on Windows?  And the config directory is
> > essentially the .gnucash from the v2.6 release?
> >
> > I think this is right, just making sure I understand.
> >
> > Thank you,
> >
> > Michael
>
> Hi Michael,
>
> No it's more subtle than that.
>
> The XDG_* variables come from a free desktop specification [1] that
> defines a
> number standard directories and paths that each system that claims to
> follow
> this standard should adhere to. Most desktop environments (kde, gnome,
> xfce,...) on linux do adhere to this so they can interoperate properly.
> Many
> programs rely on this, and gnucash is no exception as it's based on gtk
> (which
> underpins the gnome desktop environment as well).
>
> There are two that gnucash uses as of gnucash 3.0 and related to user data:
> XDG_DATA_HOME (defaults to ~/.local/share on linux)
> XDG_CONFIG_HOME (defaults to ~/.config on linux)
>
> On systems that follow the XDG specification, users can override either by
> setting environment variables with these names. In practice this is
> everywhere
> except on Windows and in the Quarz version of gnucash. Both of these
> instead
> use the platform specific default paths and will ignore the XDG_* settings
> [2].
>
> As you may observe neither path is specific to gnucash. These directories
> are
> shared by all applications adherering to the above specification. So in
> order
> to keep these directories tidy, most applications make an application
> specific
> subdirectory in there. For gnucash on linux these are (predictably)
> ~/.local/share/gnucash
> ~/.config/gnucash
>
> The former can be overridden by setting GNC_DATA_HOME, the latter can't be
> overridden (that's an oversight, not intentional).
>
> Lastly, the 2.6 .gnucash dir has no one to one mapping to a directory
> under
> 3.0. In fact it's content has been distributed over the two directories
> above.
> The rationale is this:
> Any configuration file we expect the user to tweak manually should go in
> config/gnucash. GnuCash will never alter any file in there (except for the
> one-time initial migration. Any file we don't expect the user to tweak
> manually (as it's written and maintained by gnucash itself) should go into
> local/share/gnucash. We expect users to not touch these files directly and
> gnucash can overwrite these at any time.
>
> Files that should go in .config are things like a customized css file, a
> config file with custom scheme code, ...
> Files that still go in .local/share are saved reports (gnucash manages
> these),
> state files, style sheets,...
>
> Currently the accelerator-maps are also still stored in there, but I
> believe
> this is a mistake as well that should be corrected at some point.
>
> I hope this additional background info is helpful.
>
> Regards,
>
> Geert
>
>
> [1] https://specifications.freedesktop.org/basedir-spec/
> basedir-spec-latest.html
> [2] this is not completely true, but I'm trying to to complicate it even
> more.
> The be precise: gnucash itself will ignore the two environment variables
> on
> Windows and OS X/Quarz, but some of its dependencies don't (like you can
> set
> XDG_CONFIG_HOME to tweak where gtk looks for its user config for example).
>
>
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