[Aptitude-devel] Bug#894332: Bug#894332: aptitude fails to follow free desktop basedir specifications

[Axel Beckert]

Control: severity -1 wishlist
Control: retitle -1 aptitude: Please adhere to the full free desktop basedir specifications and support $XDG_CONFIG_HOME

Hi shirish,

shirish शिरीष wrote:
> Thank you for maintaining aptitude for as long as you have. For
> reasons unknown, aptitude hasn't used free desktop basedir
> specifications

That's not completely true. Aptitude already cares about
$XDG_CACHE_HOME.

A cache is easy to throw away and rebuilt, so changing that directory
was easy.

Moving around config files is way more difficult to do right. And we're
not developers of a desktop environment who don't care if the user's
configuration from the last release still works with our next release.
So I'm rather reluctant to change anything on the configuration paths.

> I can understand that there exists a possibility of breakage if the
> change is introduced in the next release or something.

Yes.

> $XDG_CONFIG_HOME defines the base directory relative to which user
> specific configuration files should be stored. If $XDG_CONFIG_HOME is
> either not set or empty, a default equal to $HOME/.config should be
> used.

Yes. aptitude currently does not use $XDG_CONFIG_HOME, just
$XDG_CACHE_HOME.

> FILES
>        /var/lib/aptitude/pkgstates
>            The file in which stored package states and some package
> flags are stored.

Please note that this is not a user-specific file but a
system-specific file and has nothing to do with user settings.

>        /etc/apt/apt.conf, /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/*,

These are APT's system-wide configuration files. The same applies here.

> ~/.aptitude/config
>            The configuration files for aptitude.  ~/.aptitude/config
> overrides /etc/apt/apt.conf. See apt.conf(5) for documentation of the
> format and contents of these files.

That's the only file affected and changing it means:

* to adapt code to look for aptitude's configuration file in more than
  one location.
* to decide to which file aptitude writes its configuration when the
  user changes something inside aptitude and multiple files exist.
* to potentially have code inside aptitude which _reliably_ moves
  $HOME/.aptitude/config to $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/aptitude/config.
* to potentially remove $HOME/.aptitude/ if empty.
* to educate users about that change.

I'm not sure if that's really worth the effort.

IIRC we discussed that already once in the past when $XDG_CACHE_HOME
got implemented and decided against it at least back then.

		Regards, Axel
-- 
 ,''`.  |  Axel Beckert <abe at debian.org>, https://people.debian.org/~abe/
: :' :  |  Debian Developer, ftp.ch.debian.org Admin
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