On Thu, 06.11.14 11:28, Rahul Sundaram (metherid@gmail.com) wrote:

Hi

This is request for the WG members to vote on requiring all defaults apps/components in the workstation installation be compliant with the xdg base dir spec.

Rationale:

This is more or less the current status already with very few but high profile components including Firefox and NSS. They could be grandfathered in for now with a time limit for them to be compliant. If more apps were compliant with the spec, it helps in maintenance of the system, especially backups. It would also help convince upstreams to take this spec more seriously if a major distribution requires it.

Prior discussions at

https://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/desktop/2014-October/010979.html

So there's the general problem that the XDG basedir spec has issues. I find it quite understandable that Mozilla is not following this, because the spec is not particularly useful in many ways. It's also a bit too complicated, and the packages which do use it, tend to use it in ways that are really off. For example, they keep writing to ~/.local even though that's probably more a place to place resources in that never change after being written.

The spec never defined a directory for "state", even though many apps need that, which frequently had the effect that apps would place that state in ~/.local, instead...

From the systemd side we tried to clean this up, and give a good

recommendation on how this really should look like. We should probably get the XDG basedir spec updated accordingly, but I figure there will be some opposition to that, since it was too vague before and everybody found his own interpretation.

The systemd document about this you find here:

http://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/file-hierarchy.html#Home%20D...

While I sympathize with the idea of mandating that apps in the default Fedora install make use of this, we really should get the spec in order before.

Lennart

-1 - I think Matthias covers the basic reasoning well at:

https://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/desktop/2014-October/011032.html

Beyond that: the vast majority of applications available for Fedora will not be installed by default - it's not much of a carrot to tell an upstream application author that they need to conform the basedir standard to be included by default, when they *won't* be installed by default.

If we want Firefox to conform to the basedir spec we need to try to achieve that by communication and possibly providing help with it - not by policy.

- Owen

----- Original Message -----

Hi

This is request for the WG members to vote on requiring all defaults apps/components in the workstation installation be compliant with the xdg base dir spec.

Rationale:

This is more or less the current status already with very few but high profile components including Firefox and NSS. They could be grandfathered in for now with a time limit for them to be compliant. If more apps were compliant with the spec, it helps in maintenance of the system, especially backups. It would also help convince upstreams to take this spec more seriously if a major distribution requires it.

Prior discussions at

https://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/desktop/2014-October/010979.html

Thank you

Rahul

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2014-11-06 17:28 GMT+01:00 Rahul Sundaram metherid@gmail.com:

Hi

This is request for the WG members to vote on requiring all defaults apps/components in the workstation installation be compliant with the xdg base dir spec.

-1

I see no benefit for the Fedora Workstation as a product. It will not really change the user experience. I only see more work that should happen upstream in first place.

We could of course treat this as recommendation, but then again, I see no benefit for a recommendation specific to the Workstation. If we recommend it, it should apply to all Fedora packages.

Even though I disagree, I thank you for bringing this up.

Best regards, Christoph