Review Request 127462: Add support for XDG_*_HOME enviroment variables.

[Jarosław Staniek]

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My thoughts mostly related to non-Plasma, non-XDG run environments.

KF5 is a great addition, in hierarchy often sitting aside of Qt, not a part of XDG-compliant desktop. As such we can't say too much about the underlying OS. It may be XDG-compliant but athis can be a decission at various levels: by application developer or on deployment. Things can of course also change after the binary is compiled.

It's hard to see any benefit that apps 'pretend' being XDG-compliant by setting vartiables this way on, say, MS Windows or Mac. Qt applications on these systems do not traditionally alter the OS' paradigm, they are.. just apps, as native as possible/reasonable. Example: there are portable apps (on an USB stick) - I believe we can benefit if we help making them. These apps choose not to integrate too much with what's found on the system, often the user account is shared or temporary.

Setting the variable makes KConfig closer to specific groups of desktop, which is a a small step back. People may be interested in KConfig lib as a general purpose utility in their apps.
I'd compare setting the variable this way to setting Windows' USERPROFILE variable on Linux systems, just because it's standard under the former and under Wine. it does not hurt but leaves bad taste.

So the behaviour at least shall be ifdef'd and the ifdef shall depend on OS for which we're building. But if the same binary should behave well in various environments, I am unsure about hardcoding the behaviour. Also I am not sure if this behaviour should be ON by default. I'd rather have it OFF if it's present at all.

- Jarosław Staniek


On March 22, 2016, 4:23 p.m., Sandro Knauß wrote:
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> This is an automatically generated e-mail. To reply, visit:
> https://git.reviewboard.kde.org/r/127462/
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> (Updated March 22, 2016, 4:23 p.m.)
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> Review request for KDE Frameworks and Matthew Dawson.
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> Repository: kconfig
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> Description
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> According to freedesktop specification XDG_*_HOME env varaible should be
> replaced, if they are not setted with default values.
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> https://specifications.freedesktop.org/basedir-spec/basedir-spec-latest.html
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> as qgetenv only calls getenv, so no path is traslated to it default values. So we have to add this replacement manually. This would help to use XDG_*_HOME more often in configfiles.
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> Diffs
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>   autotests/kconfigtest.cpp e92197f3be57ead47b70ca5d040474e7a554c416 
>   src/core/kconfig.cpp 07fa6f552c61c52cc1dd64a1c5fb0e2f00873d50 
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> Diff: https://git.reviewboard.kde.org/r/127462/diff/
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> Testing
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> Adding tests for XDG_*_HOME variables.
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> Thanks,
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> Sandro Knauß
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>

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