On Sunday 16 January 2011, John Ralls wrote: > 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.
Oops, I mixed those up yes. g_get_user_config_dir defaults to $HOME/.config, g_get_user_data_dir defaults to $HOME/.local/share. The problem with the latter is that g_get_user_data_dir on Windows is equal to g_get_home_dir. So using that on Windows just doesn't change anything to what we have now. > 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. > On my systems (currently Fedora 13 and 14) which I use as primary desktops, both .config and .local/share hold data for 10-30 applications. Some are KDE some are Gnome. I also know Gnome has made it a GnomeGoal to have all of its applications use these directories. So at least for Gnome, this seems to be the way to go in the future. > 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. > I presume you mean to make this change after I have made the changes to use g_get_user_config_dir ? Geert _______________________________________________ gnucash-devel mailing list gnucash-devel@gnucash.org https://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-devel
