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Comment by joshka | Hacker News Reader

(I maintain a fairly popular TUI library), and as a CLI/TUI user on macOS, I dislike the App Support folder a lot. But even though I dislike it, I'd expect that apps for mac should put their files there because the XDG spec doesn't apply to macOS. It's the wrong place, but the technically correct one. The right thing to do is fix the spec, and then fix the apps / libs to follow that.

I wrote a top level thread that this should be fixed by adding an explicit "I want XDG even though I'm on macOS" setting somewhere. Probably another environment variable.

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And I’d also argue that the App Support folder doesn’t apply to CLI/TUI config files either. Apple doesn’t force CLI programs it distributes from storing files in App Support. If this were the case, wouldn’t you also expect the .ssh folder to be relocated from $HOME to App Support on a Mac?

Much like the original author, my opinion is that you should do the least surprising to the user and if that’s not what the spec says, so be it.

Maybe it's because it's not their programs and they want to pull from upstream?

I completely expect for that to be the case. My point is, there are already programs distributed with macOS that don’t put config in the ~/Library/Application Support folder. Knowing this, I don’t see a good argument for (especially portable) CLI/TUI programs for keeping user editable config data in the App Support folder.

> this should be fixed by adding an explicit "I want XDG even though I'm on macOS" setting somewhere. Probably another environment variable.

Why another one? If an XDG env var is set explicitly, that's obviously what the user wants. Just don't (necessarily) use the spec's defaults when it's not set.

The xdg vars only control the location. There’s no var to control that xdg should be used. macOS has a canonical approach, which some tools choose to ignore. I want a flag to make that ignorance correct

I know, but if XDG vars controlling the location exist then obviously 'use XDG' is desired.

No. There are many situations where these are set where that’s not true.

How does the XDG spec not apply to macOS, and what "fix" are you proposing? https://specifications.freedesktop.org/basedir-spec/latest/ https://www.theregister.com/2024/10/11/macos_15_is_unix/

> Probably another environment variable

Having any of the existing XDG_* environment variables set is an incredibly-clear indication that the user wants the XDG spec followed.

Because it was designed for Linux distros, by Linux distros, not UNIX vendors.

Where is XDG on Open Group standards?

The XDG environment variables only apply to systems where the XDG spec is defined to be in place. You need one extra flag for defining that to be true. Given that macOS isn't a place where XDG is applicable, suddenly making it applicable would break every place that assumes that it's not applicable (e.g. I no longer have configuration for some utility that uses the pre-change value of the AppSupport folders.

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