Re: Prioritizing ~/.local/bin over /usr/bin on the PATH

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On Mi, 02.05.18 17:44, Nicolas Mailhot (nicolas.mailhot@xxxxxxxxxxx) wrote:

> Le 2018-05-02 16:53, Paul Wouters a écrit :
> 
> > So I don't think your "User explicitly installed SW into his home
> > directory" is true, and it is especially not true if software can
> > make use of knowing ~/.bin will be there for it to quietly drop some
> > things in.
> 
> The XDG spec and its insistence on mediating all accesses via env variables
> that themselves (by default) point to hidden directories has always been a
> trainwreck. All the more so since the main justification for this choice was
> to allow localized directory names in desktop icons that were supposed to be
> sourced from ~/ except it was quickly superseded by ~/Desktop (in
> English!),

You are mixing up xdg-basedir and xdg-user-dir:

https://standards.freedesktop.org/basedir-spec/basedir-spec-latest.html

vs.

https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/xdg-user-dirs/

> many apps could never have dealt with the codepoints required by some human
> languages, and the whole thing was finally dumped overboard by GNOME anyway.
> After many years many apps have still not learned to read those env vars, or
> hardcode their default value, or whatever. It's massively over-engineered,
> under-used, opaque to users and so on.

The basedir stuff doesn't bother with l10n at all, only xdg-user-dirs
does. And to my knowledge gnome still very much uses xdg-user-dirs, at
least if I open nautilus I still see all the xdg-user-dirs defined
dirs on the left...

> It badly needs to be rewritten without hidden dotdirs, without positing apps
> that by and large rely on hardcoded default values or config files find
> suddenly convenient to read env vars all the times just in case someone
> deemed smart to rename default dir names to something else (the legacy XDG
> envs vars could then point to the new dir hierarchy for the apps that bother
> reading them), in fact, without positing that part of the *nix directory
> hierarchy has a specific renaming behavior when the rest is fixed in stone
> (that's too much schizophrenia for the average *nix app writer).

the xdg-basedir focusses on system level stuff, i.e. libraries, data,
binaries and suchlike. the xdg-userdir stuff focusses on user-facing
stuff, i.e. documents, music, videos, and so on. That's why the former
places stuff in ~/.local, away from the user's view, while the latter
places stuff in localized directories with no dot prefix, as they
should be visible directly.

I mean, I was involved in one of the two specs, hence I am of course
biased, but even if the specs turned out not to be perfect after
15years of use, definitely a lot of thought went into them. And what's
"perfect" anyway?

Lennart

-- 
Lennart Poettering, Red Hat
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