Supporting XDG Base Directory Specification

[ghost]

Hey everyone,

I've been playing around with ssbc recently, and first of all: Thanks for that wonderful piece of software. 💜

One thing jumped to me: config location was hardcoded to $HOME/.ssb. Would you be interested in supporting the XDG spec?

To be explicit, I'd be willing to make it work myself if need be.

[arj03]

I don't think anybody would mind a patch for this :)

[stale[bot]]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. It will be closed if no further activity occurs. Thank you for your contributions.

[christianbundy]

I think the next steps on this would be to:

• Move ~/.ssb/config to $XDG_CONFIG_HOME, usually ~/.config/ssb/
• Move ~/.ssb/ to $XDG_DATA_HOME, usually ~/.local/share/ssb/

The only rename would likely be for the config file, maybe ~/.config/ssb/config.json?

[christianbundy]

I think the only hiccup here is that ssb-config defines only a single path so we'd need to split that into two so that it points to ~/.local/share/ssb while only the config points to ~/.config/ssb/.

[ahdinosaur]

i'm :+1: on this: https://github.com/ssbc/ssb-config/pull/26

at the moment, ssb-config uses rc, which gathers up the config from various (non-configurable) sources. i'd be keen if we ditched rc to gather up the config from $XDG_CONFIG_HOME, then pass in $XDG_DATA_HOME as the path for ssb-server (and flume) things, which will hopefully work as i discovered ssb is surprisingly non-configurable with respect to any file paths (there's only a single path config var).

[dominictarr]

rc puts the configuration in the traditional places. these are widely understood to be where configuration goes, and many other programs do the same thing. That's the reason rc is unconfigurable - being configurable just means someone can put it in a weird place.

At this point, changing it will have much more impact purely from the cost of the change, that I think it will take quite a bit more effort to fix than this is really worth.

[jedahan]

@ahdinosaur does this mean if I set XDG_DATA_HOME to $HOME/.local/share it should just work?

[stale[bot]]

Is this still relevant? If so, what is blocking it? Is there anything you can do to help move it forward?