I think the XDG spec is pretty petty. What difference does it make that the files are in ~/.config/mozilla instead of ~/.mozilla? And calling it a bug is presumptuous.
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.
export ANDROID_USER_HOME="$XDG_DATA_HOME"/android
alias adb='HOME="$ANDROID_USER_HOME" adb'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.
Not to take away from your point but I shall introduce you to systemd-tmpfiles
no scripts needed, it can clean up for you if you keep a list of directories/files to clean up
A brilliant idea, but goddamn what a shame it is that we have to do such things to keep our homes clean
Your point is valid for config/data split, but that seems to be a judgement call and many applications do things differently there.
I'm not saying it's a bad idea to try to follow xdg, just that it's a complex and ongoing thing. It's a good example of the "Just do X!" fallacy.