[fpc-pascal] fpmake: output directories

[Michael Van Canneyt]

On Wed, 3 Jun 2009, Graeme Geldenhuys wrote:

> 2009/6/3 Michael Van Canneyt <michael at freepascal.org>:
>>
>> I don't think the 'freedesktop' standard is much of a standard.
>> Like I said, it was a mistake to have followed the 'standard'.
>
> Well if everybody thinks like that, then NOTHING will become a
> standard. The "dot" files idea is a mess, the FHS is a mess.

FHS, I don't know; But .dot files are IMHO easy to grasp.

I really don't see what the problem is with the .dot files, and why this
custom had to be changed.


> I greatly appreciate the efforts freedesktop.org and LSB are trying to
> do. The application development under Linux, *BSD, etc is a huge mess
> compared to OS X and Windows.

Why ? Windows is even more of a mess as far as I'm concerned,
and I develop on it since years. With each version of windows,
I'd have to relocate all my application files. Debugging problems
is next to impossible, because Windows is a black box. No thanks.


>> The ONLY programs that I know of that write to ~/.config are the
>> programs using the sysutils GetAppConfigDir.
>
> Well, I have a new Ubuntu 8.04 install which is about 1.5 months old.
> I already have the following applications that use the ~/.config
> directory.
>
>  BeyondCompare
>  Tracker
>  Compiz
>  Qt (not KDE based)
>  Totem
>  GTK-2.0
>  DoubleCmd
>  Menus (various apps registering there desktop and menu icons here)
>  ...

Probably the fact that I use KDE - which has it's own tree - explains
that my directory is empty.

> So that's not bad for a developer only PC.  And I left out all the
> Free Pascal based applications like, FPCUnit, Lazarus, Lazarus Data
> Desktop, TutorAdmin, fpGUI UI Designer, etc..
>
> So my opinion, is that it is great that there is an effort no get some
> desktop application standard going. That way developers can query an
> environment variable to detect the users preferred directory
> locations, preferd editor, web browser, image viewer, video player
> etc... Otherwise how else is a Linux application developer going to
> query such things.
>
> I'm all for some desktop standards under Linux! :-)

So am I, but I don't have the impression that the freedesktop one
is much followed.

> BTW:
> Michael, did you know that you *can* set your $XDG_CONFIG_HOME
> environment variable so that it uses something other that ~/.config/
> directory.  The ~/.config/ is simply the default location if the
> $XDG_CONFIG_HOME environment variable is not set.

I know this, but in practice, what can I set it to ? $HOME is not an 
option, because then my home directory is cluttered with visible
files and directories.

Michael.