Opinion about XDG support by the Clojure tools (deps, cli)

[jgomo3]

@alexmiller

For future reference, requests or problems with the Clojure CLI should be filed at https://ask.clojure.org where they can be triaged into tickets. I might see things here, but also, I might not.

Noted, thanks.

@alexmiller

Can you point to some doc references for XDG that would definitely say how to determine if it is an XDG system?

Sure. The XDG Base Directory Specification should be that document (version 0.8 today).

I think there is no an API or standard way to ask a System if it is an XDG system because it’s a chicken-egg problem. What I’ve seen it is mostly done is checking for the $XDG_CONFIG_HOME value and if not, checking for the $HOME/.config folder; failing that “means” not XDG.

The tool published in the Freedesktop site for scripting is a Python tool called pyxdg, and it has a module dedicated to the Base Directory specification. You can see specifically how they define the xdg_config_home as:

xdg_config_home = os.environ.get('XDG_CONFIG_HOME') or \
            os.path.join(_home, '.config')

TLDR: The XDG Base Directory Specification should be that document.