Re: [arch-general] XDG variables no longer set

26 Feb 2013


      On Tue, Feb 26, 2013 at 6:57 AM, Robbie Smith  wrote:
...
On 26/02/13 22:44, Daniel Micay wrote:
...
On Tue, Feb 26, 2013 at 6:42 AM, Robbie Smith  wrote:
...
For some reason, after my last reboot (a kernel update), none of the XDG
variables[1] (such as $XDG_CONFIG_HOME) are being set, which broke a lot
of
my configuration, as I rely on those in scripts.
I was able to fix it by writing a script[2] to drop in /etc/profile.d/
that
would create those directories and export the variables as required, but
what I want to know is why they broke in the first place.
Has anyone else experienced this?
Robbie
[1]
http://standards.freedesktop.org/basedir-spec/basedir-spec-latest.html#varia...
[2] Like this (taken from /etc/xdg/xfce4/xinitrc) :
     #!/bin/sh
     # $XDG_CONFIG_HOME defines the base directory relative to which
     # user specific configuration files should be stored. If
     # $XDG_CONFIG_HOME is either not set or empty, a default equal to
     # $HOME/.config should be used.
     if test "x$XDG_CONFIG_HOME" = "x" ; then
         XDG_CONFIG_HOME=$HOME/.config
         export XDG_CONFIG_HOME
     fi
     [ -d "$XDG_CONFIG_HOME" ] || mkdir "$XDG_CONFIG_HOME"
You can only expect these to be set if the default has been changed.
If they're unset, it means anything querying them should fall back to
~/.config (and the other fallbacks).
They didn’t exist at all. I had to manually export them or they didn’t exist
at login, which is why I wrote that script.
Yes, that's correct. They aren't supposed to be set by default (it was
a bug that they were). Your scripts/applications that use those
variables should be checking for their existence and falling back to a
default unless you're sure that you're setting them manually yourself.