On Jan 16, 2011, at 7:19 AM, Geert Janssens wrote: > Historically, GnuCash has always stored its user specific application data in > ~/.gnucash based on old linux (unix ?) conventions. > > This didn't work really well on Mac OS X/Quartz, so John has overridden this > path on OS X to make more sense there. > > Now there's a bugreport that indicates this isn't the best place on Windows > either [1]. > > I could override the path on Windows as well and be done with it, but in my > investigation I found that even on linux ~/.<appname> is no longer the > recommended place to store such information. > > According to the XDG Base Directory Specification [2] the preferred location > is ~/.local/share/<appname>. > > The nice thing is, glib has a convenience function g_get_user_config_dir, > which by default returns ~/.local/share on linux and the equivalent and > proper > ~\Application Data (Windows XP) or ~\AppData\Roaming (Windows Vista/7). > > I don't know what this routine returns on OS X, but I would expect it to > return the proper location for user specific application data there as well. > If not that should be reported as a bug againse glib on OS X. > > In this light I would like to update the GnuCash code to make use of the > g_get_user_data_dir function on all platforms and rename the directory from > .gnucash to gnucash. That would give a better experience on all platforms IMO. > This is what the directories would become: > - Linux: ~/.local/share/gnucash > - Windows XP: c:\Documents and Settings\<user>\Application Data\gnucash > - Windows Vista/7: c:\Documents and Settings\<user>\AppData\Roaming\gnucash > - OS X: ? > > I would obviously have to provide some conversion code as well, that would > copy the old .gnucash contents to .local/share/gnucash to guarantee > continuity > for the users. > > I also think this change may be better for 2.5/2.6 than 2.4.1. > > Does anyone have any objections to this ?
You must have $XDG_CONFIG_HOME set on your Linux system. If that's not set, then g_get_user_config_dir returns $HOME/.config., which if everyone used it would be an improvement over littering $HOME with hidden directories. Not everybody uses it, though. In fact, on my Debian Lenny VM, ~/.local/share contains one subdirectory, "Trash", and ~/.config contains two, "gtk+-2.0" and "enchant". AQBanking and GConf each have their own hidden directories. Admittedly, I have that VM set up with KDE, and I use it only for development so there aren't a lot of applications on it. I think it makes more sense to lift get_special_folder(int) from glib/gutils.c, use that to set the directory on win32, and to leave the rest alone... but the change is mostly harmless (you'll need to look for ~/.gnucash and copy it over, and maybe ask the user if she wants to delete the old location), so if you really want to do it I have no objections. I'll just change GNC_DOT_DIR to XDG_CONFIG_HOME in the OSX launcher script. Regards, John Ralls _______________________________________________ gnucash-devel mailing list gnucash-devel@gnucash.org https://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-devel
