Re: [orca-list] Changed the user's preference directory

[Trevor Saunders <trev saunders gmail com>]

Hi,

While some people seem to think I'm against change instead of against
bad changes, I'm fine with this.

On Mon, Jul 26, 2010 at 05:36:47AM +0200, Juanje Ojeda wrote:
> Hi :-)
>
> I've just pushed two patches[1][2] to the master in order to fix this bug:
> https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=596108
>
> The bug is about to use XDG locations for storing configuration files.
> XDG locations are the Freedesktop.org ones:
> http://standards.freedesktop.org/basedir-spec/latest/ar01s03.html
>
> This is important because two reasons:
>  * This is a goal for GNOME to have moved all the user's configs to
> XDG locations[3]
>  * It's crossdesktop solution

fine by me.  Personally I think both are perfectly cross desktop.  One
question, shouldn't this be XDG_CONFIG_HOME not XDG_DATA_HOME?
Personally I don't see the point in this standard (it seems like a
standard looking for a problem to solve), but I'm fine with doing what it
suggests because it seems to make some people happy.

> We know there is people here using the Orca master's version and the
> one from their distro and to move their ~/.orca to XDG-DATA-HOME/orca
> could be a problem because the one from the distro won't know anything
> about this new location.
> That's why right now the migration is optional. Let's see with some user cases:
>  * New user install the version from master. He/she hasn't run Orca
> before so hasn't got any configs stored at ~/.orca.
> When the user run Orca the first time, it will create the
> configuration files at XDG-DATA-HOME/orca
>  * Betatester is using the version from his/her distro but also is
> testing the last version from master. To be able to switch from one to
> another version keeping the configs, the config directory must be
> ~/.orca. The one that understand both versions.
> By default, the new code from master won't change anything, so this
> case is safe.
>  * User want to have the last version from the master and just that
> version. The new code has a new command line option for migrating the
> config files ('-m, --migrate-config').
> If the user pass this option the ~/.orca directory will be moved to
> XDG-DATA-HOME/orca.
>
> The idea is to change the default behavior just before the release,
> when the betatesters won't need so much to main both versions. Then
> the migrate option will be deleted and the default behaviour will be
> to use XDG-DATA-HOME and if ~/.orca exists, this will me moved to the
> new location.

Personally I would have used the move and link approach that Joanie
commented on in the bug, but I gues this works.  My reasoning is
basically that it feels a lot cleaner to do it that way.  Doing it
something like this also results in far fewer special cases.

if [ -d $XDG_DATA_HOME/orca ]
then
mv $HOME/.orca $XDG_DATA_HOME/orca
ln -s $XDG_DATA_HOME/orca $HOME/.orca
fi

Of course this doesn't take care of notifying the user which probably
has to be done in python instead of the shell wrapper.  What this
would get us is that new versions of orca only have to worry about xdg
stuff and older versions can happily use $HOME/.orca

One idea this gives me is that a lot of applications provide a flag to
provide a path to alternate configuration is this something that
people think is a good idea?

One other thing to keep in mind is that while some distributions may
tie release cycles to gnome releases many do not, and distributions
may well also be shipping old gnome versions (debian ships 2.22 on the
current stable and RHEL ships 2.16, I'm not sure what the next RHEL
release will use, but I believe debian will ship 2.30).

> I'm not sure if I've explain myself well but the lasts comments at the
> bug maybe can clarify it. I think Joanmarie can explain better things
> than me :-)

clear enough, bug 570650 had some interesting reading.  I was unaware
of yaml, it looks a lot nicer than gconf / gsettings /
user-settings.py / hand written parser / many other things I can't
think of, I would happily
support using something similar for orca configuration.  If other
people are interested I would take a look at writing a back end to the
settings manager idea to support this.

have a great day :-)
and thanks for making me discover yaml!

Trev

> Cheers :-)
>
> [1] http://git.gnome.org/browse/orca/commit/?id=759c61df50e61c92c274cf5a9461945bd267d54b
> [2] http://git.gnome.org/browse/orca/commit/?id=49af893c1894821ef0f868aebf75e42c716db8ef
> [3] http://live.gnome.org/GnomeGoals/XDGConfigFolders
> -- 
> Juanje
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