Firefox 147 Will Support the XDG Base Directory Specification

> Adding additional configuration paths is confusing and potentially risky for .ssh as, quite unlike usual "desktop" apps, it grants system access and having its configuration smeared across several possible paths makes managing this more confusing and brittle.[1]

I think this is clearly true for something like ~/.ssh/authorized_keys; it is perhaps less true for ~/.ssh/config and or ~/.ssh/known_hosts which could go in XDG_CONFIG_HOME and XDG_DATA_HOME, but if part of the point of the XDG BDS is to reduce dotfiles in $HOME then it makes less sense to move some, but not all of those files.

1: https://marc.info/?l=openssh-unix-dev&m=170687803731931&w=2

Tunderbird, of course, kept mail and config in same directory. The migration process renamed .icedove to .thunderbird and removed it.

But the config for mailboxe still had .icedove/xyz path. So once config migration is finished, mails start to download in old location, and after restarting thunderbird goes "hey, there is both .icedove and .thunderbird dir, I'm not starting".

with XDG that config would be separate so there would be no need to even move the data dir

[0] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=259356

So no migration to the XDG directory, but also no throwing away your existing data either.

[0] https://hg-edge.mozilla.org/integration/autoland/rev/8a6d6c0...

you joke but they did just close out the initial implementation of a something like 27 year old bug. about:keyboard was recently added to nightly to allow you to change or clear the built in keyboard shortcuts of a bunch of menu items like save, back, refresh, or open dev tools or whatever.

If that’s true, the title of the issue (and blog post) is quite untrue. Shoving everything in ~/.config is different than following the XDG Base Directory spec.

At least it’s one dotfile less that’s polluting my home.

(Some UX designer or developer thought it was a great idea to remove the back and forward buttons from the context menu if text is selected so now I have two different context menus and one of them lack the thing I am looking for most of the time which is the back button.

Or fixing the tabstrip API (someone has decided we users are now too stupid to use only tree style tabs and for our own good we must be prevented from hiding the original tab bar).

More of this, less AI-cramming, please!

The reason most software is not "XDG-compliant" is because most software predates the XDG basedir spec which only came into existence in 2021 (edit: oops, that's just version 0.8; version 0.6 was available in 2003)

It will be nice for software, as it updates, to support this standard which seems to be gaining adoption, and it will make users homedirs much cleaner. But it's most important for software to _keep working_, and have a migration path that doesn't lose the user's config or end up with two configs and not have a clear rule on which one it will use.

Then Firefox (and ansible, and many others) comes barreling in dropping an unconfigurable dot-directory in my fucking home folder ignoring the perfectly good XDG variables I have set.

It is a constant struggle to stop my home folder from not feeling like my home. Developers ought to learn some fucking respect.

One being that it's _my_ $HOME, not some random developers'. I literally had more than 50 different dotfiles and dotfolders in my $HOME at some point. It was a garbage dump and I couldn't even identify the culprit with some of them. Simply disrespectful.

Then there's the issue of cleaning up leftovers and stale cache files. It shouldn't take a custom script cleaning up after every special snowflake that decided to use some arbitrarily-named directory in $HOME.

Not following the spec also makes backing up vital application state much much harder.

In the end, I made my $HOME not writeable so I could instantly find out if some software wants to take a dump. It turns out it's often simply unnecessary as well, the software doesn't even care, just prints an error and continues.

that's exactly the point — you can run out of space in your /home but that does not affect, for example, /var. or vice versa, log explosion in /var is contained within its own partition and does not clog the entire filesystem.

It also lets you somewhat-better enforce things like:

* Setting some data aside as read-only-never-touch-it.

* Excluding some files and directories from searching and indexing.

although admittedly you don't _have_ to partition for that purpose.

For years I’ve been putting all user data into a separate /data partition and have kept the OS partition small (~30gb). But you have to fix the system when first installed. When I still used Windows I had the same c:/d: split.

More recently started putting kernels into a bigger ESP (EFI) partition with sdboot or uki.

With terabyte system disks, running out of space mostly doesn’t happen anymore unless you made the system partition(s) small. Don’t do that, give them plenty of GB, each of which are now thousandths of the disk.

1. The way Unix works, a directory is a file, so if you can write in a directory you'll also be able to move directories around (and thus break the structure you mentioned completely).

2. Doesn't make sense for multi-user. Yes, I understand most people have their own computers, but (1) why design it in a way that breaks multi-user unnecessarily? (2) there are a lot of utility users, and having them get access to user files because of the way this is structured is silly.

3. `grep -r` is going to be a pain in the ass when searching your own files, because it'll also search all the other system subdirectories too.

  Time ? I'm focused on other things.

I like environment variables, but developers/operating systems have trouble using them well.

I could almost see XDG_CONFIG_HOME being a setting read by a driver that provides access to a "virtual" path (on *nix, all paths are virtual anyways).

I despise programs that think they can just run a goddamn train on my home directory. I'm sick of hidden files I'm expected to edit by hand for configuration. I sick of ugly dotfiles everywhere.