On Wed, May 02, 2018 at 09:42:44PM +0200, Lennart Poettering wrote: > On Mi, 02.05.18 21:13, Lennart Poettering (mz...@0pointer.de) wrote: > > > So yeah, Allison also suggested that having a single "XDG_PREFIX" env > > var would have been the much better option, rather than have > > individual ones. Now, that ship sailed pretty much, but that's not > > reason enough to go for XDG_BIN_HOME really. I mean, "~/.local/" is > > hardcoded as fallback prefix into the spec, so we should just accept > > that here too, and admit that making this individually configurable > > wasn't the best of ideas. I mean, making the searhc paths dynamically > > configurable using an env var by all means made sense, but the "home" > > dirs? i am not convinced... > > > > But dunno, I am not feeling too strongly about this, but it appeared > > to me that just not doing an env var here was the best way to get this > > in quickly... > > So here's a strong reason for not having XDG_BIN_HOME: because $PATH > is not designed to refer to other env vars, it expects literal > paths. After all, for XDG_DATA_DIRS (and similar for the other search > path env vars) the basedir spec says that you need to search in both > XDG_DATA_DIRS and XDG_DATA_HOME, i.e. both variables are independent > of each other. But this is not how $PATH works: the variable is > implemented and respected all over the place, but what isn't listed in > it doesn't matter, hence we can define XDG_BIN_HOME as much as we > want, nobody would care, it would never be consulted.
Tools that install binaries can and should consult it, and I'd like to see those tools not hardcoding ~/.local/bin. If someone sets $XDG_BIN_HOME, it'll be their responsibility to put the target directory in $PATH. A distribution could, by default, add ~/.local/bin to $PATH in /etc/skel/.bashrc, and if someone wants to set $XDG_BIN_HOME they can edit their own ~/.bashrc to do so. And for that matter, if the distribution itself wants to set $XDG_BIN_HOME they'll also set $PATH accordingly. - Josh Triplett _______________________________________________ xdg mailing list xdg@lists.freedesktop.org https://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/xdg