[Weechat-dev] [task #10934] Follow the XDG Base Directory Specification

[Mantas M.]

Follow-up Comment #4, task #10934 (project weechat):

> 1. XDG/freedesktop.org is related to X-Window, which is not the case for
WeeChat: it runs on many operating systems (even non-free), with or without
graphical environment, and it does not depend on any X-Window lib.

This is not of any importance, as the XDG "Base Directory" spec itself only
specifies several default paths and does not depend on any X-Windows feature
either. Many pure-command-line tools (git, htop, pulseaudio, cower, fish,
newsbeuter, lftp, camlistore, ranger, systemd, mpd, …) have started using
`~/.config/` and related paths.

> 2. such change would be annoying for all existing users, it would break
compatibility, for example on /upgrade (at least it would require manual
actions to copy/move config files before upgrading).

Several other programs have solved this simply: they check if the old path
exists first (e.g. `~/.gitconfig` or `~/.mpd/`) and if it does, they continue
using it forever, without any impact to the user. If the old path doesn't
exist, the XDG paths are used.

> You can change the value when you compile WeeChat, this will not impact
other users (that's why the option exists, to change the value if you don't
like the default one).

I agree that Weechat is easy to build, but not all users have enough rights to
install all -dev libraries needed, so at least a $WEECHAT_HOME environment
variable would be still better.

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