Re: Cleaning up and structuring user-emacs-directory

[Amin Bandali <bandali@gnu.org>]

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tomas@tuxteam.de writes:

> On Wed, Aug 19, 2020 at 01:03:51AM -0400, Amin Bandali wrote:
>> Richard Stallman writes:
>> 
>> > [[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
>> > [[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
>> > [[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]
>> >
>> >   > Would it not be better to follow the freedesktop spec?
>> >   > https://specifications.freedesktop.org/basedir-spec/basedir-spec-0.6.html
>> >
>> > Concretely, what change would that mean in Emacs?
>> 
>> In short, the approach that I proposed divides up `user-emacs-directory'
>> into multiple subdirectories and keeps `user-emacs-directory' as the
>> all-in-one source of a user's Emacs files, while the XDG Base Directory
>> approach as suggested by Gunnar would imply keeping only configuration
>> files in `user-emacs-directory', and moving data and cache files to
>> "$XDG_DATA_HOME/emacs/" and "$XDG_CACHE_HOME/emacs/" respectively, where
>> 'XDG_DATA_HOME' defaults to "~/.local/share" and 'XDG_CACHE_HOME' to
>> "~/.cache".
>
> I've now read the freedesktop thing. If you ask me: please make that
> optional. I have none of those $XDG_* env vars set, and I have nothing
> of relevance in .local.
>
> Cheers
>  - t

Reading this, another con of the XDG Base Directory approach just
occurred to me:

As of now, the XDG support added in Emacs 27 for the location of
`user-emacs-directory' is completely optional: if "~/.emacs.d/" exists,
"$XDG_CONFIG_HOME/emacs/" won't be used at all.  And some people seem to
quite dislike the XDG approach.  So, basing this change upon that, users
who choose not to use "$XDG_CONFIG_HOME/emacs/" will inevitably be opted
out of this cleaning up of their Emacs directory.  I'd personally like
to have my `user-emacs-directory' be clean, even if I choose to use
"~/.emacs.d/" and not "$XDG_CONFIG_HOME/emacs/".  So, another reason for
me to prefer my original proposal of diving `user-emacs-directory' up
into subdirectories, regardless of whether or not the user uses
"$XDG_CONFIG_HOME/emacs/".

Thoughts?

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