Re: Cleaning up and structuring user-emacs-directory

[Yuan Fu]

> On Aug 19, 2020, at 11:09 PM, Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> wrote:
> 
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> [[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
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> 
>> 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".
> 
> There is a benefit to putting all cache files in ~/.cache.  For
> instance, you know where to find all the files you can safely delete,
> regardless of which program made them.
> 
> What concretely are "data" files, for Emacs?  I don't know where in
> the sources to look for that info.  Can you mention a few examples and
> what data they contain?  With specifics, we can see the concrete
> advantage of one choice or the other.  With only the abstraction "data
> files", we can see only at the level of abstractions, and that is a sort
> of blindness that can lead to bad decisions.
> 

I don’t know about the concrete definition, but some built-in examples includes:

recentf-save-file
bookmark-default-file
savehist-file
project-list-file

The main benefit for me is to clean up my .emacs.d, similar to XDG’s goal to 
clean up the home directory.

Yuan