Re: xdg-directories.el

[Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>]

> About the stability of the specification: according to the XDG Web site,
> the last version of the specification dates from 2010.  That is six years
> of no modifications.  Seems to be pretty stable now.  Maybe it is time for
> Emacs to start the adoption of the XDG Base Dir Spec and separate the files.

My experience with those kinds of standards is not that they evolve, but
that they get replaced.  6 years is pretty short for Emacs's time scales.

I'm not dead set against it, tho.  I like the idea of standardizing
those things, but I wonder exactly what would be the benefits beyond
following some standard.

Some of the down sides for me is that ~/.emacs.d is a directory where
users are expected to sometimes manually edit files (e.g. the ../init.el,
../gnus.el, ...), whereas my impression is that ~/.config is usually
meant for "hidden configs".  It's much easier to fetch C-x C-f ~/.emacs RET
C-x C-f ~/.config/emacs/init.el RET

But there might be some upsides to following the standard, e.g. some
generic "config management" tools might be able to provide useful
support, for example to sync configs between different hosts.  Tho my
impression is that the XDG standard is much too lax about the actual
format of the files to make such a tool possible, but I might be proved
wrong about that.


        Stefan