[digikam] [Bug 377587] The --database-directory argument should also be the location of the digikamrc file when used

[Glenn Washburn]

https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=377587

Glenn Washburn <development at efficientek.com> changed:

           What    |Removed                     |Added
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
             Status|RESOLVED                    |UNCONFIRMED
         Resolution|WORKSFORME                  |---

--- Comment #3 from Glenn Washburn <development at efficientek.com> ---
I think to fix this and provide a better user experience a small change should
be made.  The idea is that specifying --config is very likely if you are
specifying --database-directory.  So it would be nice to have a
per-database-directory config file default.  It makes sense that this would be
in the same directory as specified by the --database-directory option.

This is a pretty trivial change and I don't see any downsides.  However, there
are downsides to not changing this.  My worry is that by sharing a config file,
I might change a setting when using one DK database instance that will affect
another database instance without my being aware of it, until its too late.

Here's an scenario. Suppose I have one DK database instance, call it A,
managing a set of photos that I want the XMP metadata written into the image
and another DK database instance, call it B, where I want them written as
sidecar files only.  Since I'm a photographer and not a DK developer, I don't
know how DK configs are stored.  I might even guess wrongly, that they are
stored in the digikam4.db file.  So I don't realize that to not shoot myself in
the foot, I need to have two separate config files.  By default, the default
config will be shared (bad default in this case).  So supposing I setup
instance B first, then A, then when I start adding tags to B, the photos in B
will be modified, not what I was expecting.

I suspect there are a lot of use cases like the above for different config
settings.  It seems to me that the best course of action would be to default to
unique default config file when using --database-directory.  There should be no
fallback to the global default config file when --database-directory is given. 
If the user really wants to use a different config file path, perhaps sharing
with another DK instance, they can do so explicitly.  Bottom line: sharing
config files is dangerous and should not be default behavior.

The logic should be that if no --config is given, DK should first check for
digikamrc in the directory specified by --database-directory, and if it does
not exist should create a new one with default values.

This would get DK another step closer to having photo collections that are
easily re-locatable.  I'm changing this back to "UNCONFIRMED" because I don't
think this issue was really resolved.

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