Re: [PATCH] Implement XDG Base Directory specification for user-emacs-directory

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> From: "Basil L. Contovounesios" <contovob@tcd.ie>
> Cc: eggert@cs.ucla.edu,  emacs-devel@gnu.org
> Date: Sun, 28 Jul 2019 16:21:10 +0100
> 
> > In general, I feel that xdg.el is currently too Freedesktop-specific,
> > and "needs work" if we want to make it a portable mainstream package
> > useful on all the supported platforms.  (There's also a strange
> > comment about Emacs "not having a notion of l10n/i18n", which is
> > simply wrong, so support for localestring could/should also be
> > improved.)  Patches welcome.
> 
> What kind of non-Freedesktop-specific portability do you envision?

The fallback directory names are Unix-specific; the assumption that
all the settings are necessarily in a file which has a very particular
format is specific to Freedesktop; The file associations are only > 
supported in XDG way of their definitions; etc.

Of course, one could argue that this package supports the XDG spec and
nothing else, and that is completely legitimate.  But in that case
using it for general-purpose Emacs features like finding our files and
directories is questionable, and should IMO be restricted to the
absolute minimum -- more or less what Paul proposed in his patch.