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Comment by lmm | Hacker News Reader

> Hearing/reading someone trying to throw a shallow take-down of something they haven't tried

I mean, I've lived with XDG messing up where my config files are for several years at this point. How much "trying it" do I have to do to be allowed to have an opinion?

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> I mean, I've lived with XDG messing up where my config files are for several years

Why don't you set your XDG vars to where you want to put them then?

What's your alternative? Force everyone to follow your preference instead of having it configurable?

> Why don't you set your XDG vars to where you want to put them then?

I hear that argument often. When a program uses $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/tool/ for its config files, to what value should I set XDG_CONFIG_HOME to get the old behavior where it puts its config in $HOME/.tool/?

That's an interesting question, and I don't know the answer. A Google search and ChatGPT request provide no answers, so this seems like an uncommon request. It seems like there ought to be a way to achieve this reasonable request though.

Possibly setting it to $HOME would make all/most programs assume that you wanted it to live in $HOME/.tool rather than $HOME/tool, but I'm guessing. I don't know if that's the standard.

I'm not sure it is so uncommon - just that there is no answer. I'm pretty convinced that a lot less people would complain about the XDG Base Directory Specification if that would be possible.

I'm one of those (though I usually do not publicly complain about it).

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