- cross-posted to:
- programming@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- programming@lemmy.ml
Shameless plug: I am the author.
You must log in or register to comment.
حق
Shameless flex
I regret checking this
ls Volatile
It’s empty lol, it’s a directory on tmpfs that i use to build programs and similar stuff to not be hammering my ssd with unnecessary writes.
I have
$XDG_CACHE_HOMEin tmp as well and I moved the mesa sharer caches to$XDG_STATE_HOMEas that’s really the only thing so far I’ve needed to preserve.tmpfs (…) to build programs (…) to not be hammering my ssd with unnecessary writes
Sounds useful. How did you setup the directory?
Running
dftells me “tmpfs” is mounted on /run. If I build in that that directory then would it be stored in RAM, or do I need to do something else?I have /tmp in my fstab with these mount options.
tmpfs /tmp tmpfs rw,noatime,size=20G 0 0And the rest of the setup is done in my zprofile
I think I should be able to get this working following your zprofile file. Thanks!
Whoa I’m a stickler for getting as much as I can out but even I have .zshenv and some other too hard to figure out things in there. How’d you manage a total wipeout?
zsh is actually easy and it is detailed in the archwiki
You have to set
$ZDOTDIRin/etc/zsh/zshenvand iirc that was the only location that required root to edit.For the rest of stuff, here is how I fix steam for example and you can check the rest of my dotfiles for how I configured zsh and all of that.
Although I haven’t updated them, I still had a
.localdirectory back then, it was 1 week ago that I changed.localforLocaland that let to an issue with distrobox which I made a PR fixing it that’s still open though.That’s awesome!
This is probably a dumb question, but what program is that?
thunar (and the smaller window is the xfce4-terminal).
Lol, the minimalist window decoration had me thinking you were running a terminal inside of the home directory of your file manager. :D
I’ve seen weirder things.
Looks like thunar (default file manager on xfce)
My fellow FOSS users, patches are welcome.
Whatever happened to Linux being all about choice? Do you want that or not?
You can choose any home directory you want, as long as it’s XDG_CONFIG_HOME.
Are there other relevant standards? The XDG base directory specification has been around for a long time, and is well established.
Maybe your comment wooshed over my head; if so I apologize.
having choices are the opposite of conforming to standards
This standard makes your software’s paths user-configurable, giving users a choice.
And if I don’t agree with how that standard is implemented? I should have the choice to use something else. Isn’t that how everything works?
This is the stupidest argument I’ve ever heard.
To conform to a standard or do something else are each a choice. If you can justify your choice then perhaps it’s a good one.
Choosing to not conform is also a choice
Well, when software supports this standard, you as a user have a way to not confirm to it by setting the env variables to whatever you want, even per app. So you have two choises, either use it as is or change it.
But if software doesn’t supportthe spec, there is no choise of using it. So ons choise less.
Choice, huh? I can’t choose where the config files are stored unless I am willing to either dig into an obscure setting, modify the source code and recompile (repeat every time there’s an update), or contact the developer’s smug beard using smoke signals.
idk that all sounds like choices to me
This would just further complicate things for me. It assumes that 1) the system even has a windowing system/desktop environment or 2) all the installed software is XDG-aware. Most of the time I’m fiddling with headless environments.
The spec doesn’t make those assumptions at all, idk where that’s coming from.
I have headless machines with XDG vars configured and ones without them. XDG compliant software works in either case, but I’m less likely to use a piece of software that clutters my $HOME.
It’s not too hard to check for XDG support first and use a few hardcoded directory paths if that is unavailable.
It’s even easier to ignore it altogether, which is what I do. I don’t use “a few” non-XDG-aware things; I use lots an lots of them.
Are you saying that you don’t want to write your software according to the XDG spec, or that you don’t want to set the XDG env vars on your system? If it’s the second that’s fine - apps using XDG work just fine if you ignore it. If it’s the first I’d suggest reconsidering because XDG can make things much easier for users of your software who have system setups or preferences that are different from yours; and using XDG doesn’t cause problems for users who ignore it.
OP’s recommendation is aimed mostly at software authors.
I meant the second. But as to the first: I generally write in-house software for headless server environments, and my peers are going to push back if I add irrelevant XDG foo to my PR.
So yes, “XDG” stands for “Cross-Desktop Group” - but I don’t agree that using the spec assumes a windowing system. The base directory spec involves checking for certain environment variables for guidance on where to put files, and falling back to certain defaults if those variables are not set. It works fine on headless systems, and on systems that are not XDG-aware (I suppose that means systems that don’t set the relevant env vars).
OTOH as another commenter pointed out the base directory spec can make software work when it otherwise wouldn’t on a system that doesn’t have a typical home directory layout or permissions.
Probably half the entries in that list are not GUI apps, and XDG doesn’t apply (though some still support it). For some others there (like emacs) XDG is used if it exists.
XDG doesn’t apply for CLI apps? About half of dirs I still have cluttering my home are GUI apps whose devs refuse to follow the specification, while I see less friction from CLI/TUI devs, since they’re the ones actually seeing these hidden locations.
What makes you think XDG doesn’t apply to non GUI apps?
It’s already in the name - XDG stands for X Desktop Group (nowadays freedesktop), which works on interoperability for desktop environments. In a pure shell environment (or even if you’re not running a full desktop) none of the XDG variables are defined, and especially in shell environments the default fallbacks specified by XDG are not necessarily what the operator would expect.
That name is decades old. XDG stands for “Cross Desktop Group”.
A “pure” X environment (e.g.
startx xterm) also doesn’t define those variables, but many desktop environments do, just like many shell configurations do.
BRB, putting in a PR to make /etc mode 1777 by default.
vim now has an option to put the .vim folder in ~/.config; though I’m not sure if the default plugin/package & syntax folders can be set under ~/.local/share.
Here is a more concise way to achieve the same thing:
ls -ACd ~/.??*/ | sed -e "s#$HOME/##g"ls -A | grep "^\."
I had to make a dummy
.dotfileto test because I don’t have hidden files in my home.I think that can be boiled down to only
cd; echo .*/Maybe throw a
;cd -on the end if the change of directory is unwanted.if you need to preserve
cd -you might be able to do this withpushdandpopd
Where did i read this… basically, the .file being hidden being a bug in the early unix filesystem, which got misused to hide configuration files.
Offenders despite XDG-variables set and with no workaround:
- .android: hardcoded in adb and i guess something in mtp too
- .pki: some tool/library Firefox and Chromium sometimes use.
- .steam: yes, that
YOU’RE NOT MY MOM I’LL DO WHAT I WANT
100% agree and I also despise devs who do this on windows, instead of using %appdata% they’re using c:\users\username\.myappisimportantandtotallydeservesthisdir
To be fair here, appdata is technically a hidden folder and there are lots of reasons an app would want it’s data accessable by the user.
Yes but then just spam the documents folder like anyone else, don’t hoard the home root for no reason except that is a lazy cross platform port
I think that also causes issues for roaming profiles and folder redirection. If roaming is turned on then everything in the %appdata%\roaming folder is synced to a server. %AppData%\Local is not. So if your app is using %AppData%\Roaming for temporary data then you are causing a whole bunch on unnecessary IO. Same for using Documents since that if often synced.
Not to mention - this isn’t necessarily the correct place for Windows anyway. That is exactly why they standardized stuff around Vista.
Plus - what about apps that store an ungodly amount data in there? Personally, I only keep the OS and basic app data (such as configs and cache) on the partition and nothing else.
Then something like Minecraft comes along and it’s like “humpty dumpty I’m crapping a lumpty” and stores all its data in “.minecraft” right there in your user directory.
Then you gotta symlink stuff around and it becomes a mess…
I have to use a separate Documents folder for my actual documents lol
Shout out to xdg-ninja - it’ll find files that are in your home and suggest how to configure the app to use XDG instead. https://github.com/b3nj5m1n/xdg-ninja
Thanks, I hadn’t heard of that. Time to add a few hundred lines to my dotfiles :)
Strange that some apps allow configuring it rather than just doing it automatically…
Are there abstractions available around the XDG specifications to resolve the proper paths?
What language? Python has PyXDG.
In shell it’s simply
XDG_DATA_HOME="${XDG_DATA_HOME:-"$HOME"/.local/share}" XDG_CONFIG_HOME="${XDG_CONFIG_HOME:-"$HOME"/.config}" etc.Thanks, I did not know about PyXDG. That was the type of thing I was asking about.
Use the environment variables.
I do. But you might have misunderstood my question. I was not asking for assistance. I was just curious if there are libraries available which allow easy adoption of the XDG specification. I imagine that such abstractions would be useful for multi-platform software and generally to lower the bar for adoption.
Depends on the programming language. In C# for example, there’s an API to get special folder paths that works in all supported environments (Windows, Linux, MacOS, Android, and I think iOS too). On Linux, it includes fallbacks in case the environment variables aren’t set.
Golang puts shit specifically in
$HOME/go. Not even.go. Just plaingo.Why is it so difficult to follow industry standards
That’s what happens when you don’t set $GOPATH I think
Of course, but that’s not the point. There should be a sane default, and there isn’t one
That doesn’t make it better.
It makes it insofar better to me that you have the option to change it. You can’t change Mozilla programs to use anything but .mozilla (apart from modifying the source code of course) so for me seeing the folder is at least a way of telling me that the variable is unset.
The better question is which folder is suited the best to store the stuff that goes into $GOPATH
Just because something is worse, doesn’t make the other thing good. A sane and standard default, as others have mentioned, is a small bar to meet.
Google
following industry standards
pick one
Go pisses me off with that. I separate projects the way I want but go wants every project written in go in one big directory?
I really didn’t like this either. It’s quite surprising, because the rest of Go tooling is quite nice. Not having a venv, or at least something like pnpm-style node_modules is weird
Why would go have a virtual environment or dep tree like node_modules equivalent, it’s not interpreted or dynamically linked.
With modules, dependencies can be vendored.
off the shelf go was too annoying for me
Nowadays I set GOENV_ROOT to an XDG location and use goenv instead.
tbh I don’t think that’s too bad… I feel like too many things are hidden that shouldn’t be hidden
What I want in
$HOMEare the following directories:If I’m on a GUI-based environment:
- Desktop
- Documents
- Downloads
In general:
- .local
- my_junk_folder_i_made
I’d like everything else to live within something like ~/.local thanks
Maybe Linux should have
.localand.roamingfolders like Windows. local = only useful on this system, roaming = good to sync across systems. Config would be in.roamingif it’s not machine-specific.Does
~/.configfit the bill for the second one?There’s some stuff in
~/.configthat’s specific to the computer. KDE is a good example - a lot of KDE apps mix config and state in the same file. There’s some solutions for syncing these files, like https://github.com/VorpalBlade/chezmoi_modify_manager which is an addon to Chezmoi that can exclude particular INI-style keys.I’m sure there’s some config files in there that are entirely specific to the computer.
There’s also things like data files that you may want to keep in sync across machines. They’re not really configs.
The only practical difference between Local and Roaming and LocalLow is that developers randomly pick one and dump your game saves in there.
There is a
.localfolder these days.Profile roaming hasn’t been solved aside from NFS mounts. I guess Syncthing might work.
