[Python-ideas] Add appdirs module to stdlib

[Philipp A.]

hi marc-andre,

you seem some misconceptions and a *very* different experience from mine:

M.-A. Lemburg mal at egenix.com <http://mailto:mal@egenix.com> schrieb am Mi.,
2. Sep. 2015 um 11:30 Uhr:

Looking at the my home dir on Linux, there doesn't seem to be
> one standard, but rather a whole set of them

can you please link to the document from a standards authority describing
those other stadards? 😉

and the good old ~/.appname is still a popular one (e.g. pip and ansible
> from
> Python land still use it; as do many other non-Python applications
> such as ncftp, emacs, svn, git, gpg, etc.).
>
as hinted at by my tongue-in-cheek comment from above: that’s not a
standard but an old convention.

git uses ${XDG_CONFIG_DIR-$HOME/.config}/git/config (try it!), as does pip.

the other ones are old as dirt so this is excusable. regarding newly
developed programs i’ll only approve it for some rare exceptions like
shells, where ~/.${SHELL}rc really is the only expected place for a config
file. (and not that me approving it means something)

~/.config/ does get some use, but mostly for GUI applications,
> not so much for command line ones.
>
where do you get this figure from? the xdg standard doesn’t say anything
about only a kind of application being targeted by the standard, and as my
fontconfig example shows, even libraries follow it.

~/.local/lib/ only appears to be used by Python :-)
>
yeah, on my system it doesn’t even exist! but that has a reson which you
can read in the standard: only ~/.local/share is pointed at by the default
for a standard dir. ~/.local/lib is probably an invention by whoever
included that path in the default $PYTHONPATH

~/.local/share/ is mostly used by desktops to register application shortcuts
>
that’s a big understatement, there’s all kinds of stuff in there. i have 56
dirs and files in there.

~/.cache/ is being used by just a handful of tools, pip being one of them.
>
hah! various parts of KDE, matplotlib, gstreamer, chromium, fontconfig,
atom, shall i go on?

--
> Marc-Andre Lemburg
> eGenix.com
>
i hope i could convince you that this isn’t “some contender among many”,
but really *the* standard for some directories on linux.

best, phil
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