Using XDG-Compliant Config Files (2024)

Using XDG-Compliant Config Files (2024)(wxwidgets.org)

29 points by ankitg12 4 days ago | 6 comments

Chu4eeno 29 minutes ago |

> XDG Base Directory Specification has been a standard for organizing application data files under Linux for a long time. Unfortunately, wxWidgets has been around for even longer, and when support for configuration files was added to it back in 1997, the usual convention was still to put these so-called “dot files” directly in the user home directory

Who do they think defined this standard, if not the people who had "been around even longer".

IIRC KDE was first with cleaning up the clutter by hiding things in ~/.kde or something like that, but there's a ton of config/bookmarks/menus/data/caches you want to everything to use, so it was a given that there would be some standardization.

hurricanepootis 9 minutes ago | |

I'm on KDE 6, and I don't have a ~/.kde. I think now a days, KDE uses ~/.config and ~/.local/share. Honestly, sometimes I wish the KDE Frameworks had a thing like Dconf, so apps can store their configurations inside of a database instead of barfing everything out into a ~/.config folder.

dbalatero 28 minutes ago |

Hopefully the migration function doesn't silently move files. If you have dotfile symlinks, those would need updating. Also it would be surprising if config files were in a new place one day.

froh 1 hour ago |

is this aspect also cross platform? like supporting Windows %APPDATA% and %LOCALAPPDATA% ?

likewise for ~/.cache ($XDG_CACHE_HOME). does wxWindows provide a cross platform abstraction for the cache dir, too?

bt1a 1 hour ago | |

Genuinely curious- what would the cross platform compatibility help with? Ease of migration? I don't remember configuring many win programs with notation like such, just the PATH

mpyne 23 minutes ago | | |

There are Qt analogs for just this thing (QStandardPaths, https://doc.qt.io/qt-6/qstandardpaths.html) to drastically simplify what can be a quite annoying task if you're trying to write GUI software that respects the OS standard file locations across multiple desktops.

This is a different problem than migrating file locations in the same OS, as what the linked blog post is about, but it is a related issue for apps intending to be multi-platform.