GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 754925
Store configuration and cache according to XDG specifications
Last modified: 2018-06-29 23:43:03 UTC
In the old unix days applications stored all their configuration dirs and files in hidden directories under the users home dir. These worked well enough back then, since there weren't many applications storing stuff there. Nowadays however, there's typically about a hundred files and dirs in the users homedir. The freedesktop organization took it into their hands to change this, and wrote a specification how to handle such data which can be found at: http://standards.freedesktop.org/basedir-spec/basedir-spec-latest.html I propose that GnuCash follows the same guidelines, to remove the clutter from users homedirs by incorporating the basedir-spec as set by the freedesktop org, which would bring the config files into .config (the default for $XDG_CONFIG_HOME) .cache for caches etc. See also: https://wiki.gnome.org/Initiatives/GnomeGoals/XDGConfigFolders
Thanks for bringing this up. It has taken me a while, but today I have committed the necessary changes to have gnucash use XDG_DATA_HOME to store the contents of .gnucash. We have chosen XDG_DATA_HOME rather than XDG_CONFIG_HOME because most of the contents of the former .gnucash directory is really that - data: saved reports, gui saved state, custom report code,... Gnucash doesn't use any cache so there was no need for .cache in our case. These changes will land for gnucash 2.8.
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