[Lazarus] The default Lazarus profile directory location

Vincent Snijders vsnijders at vodafonevast.nl
Wed Jun 3 13:15:32 CEST 2009


Michael Van Canneyt schreef:
> 
> 
> On Wed, 3 Jun 2009, Graeme Geldenhuys wrote:
> 
>> Hi,
>>
>> We just spoke about the freedesktop.org directory standards in another
>> message thread and this made me think.  Why isn't Lazarus using the
>> GetAppConfigDir(False) as it's default location for all the IDE config
>> files. It's hard-coded to $HOME/.lazarus/ directory for Linux (and
>> probably other unix type OS's as well)?

If it isn't broken, don't fix it.

>>
>> I believe Lazarus IDE uses GetAppConfigDir(False) under Windows now, 
>> but why
>> not for all platforms?

Correct. The change was needed, because more and more the executable directory was 
off limits for writing by ordinary users.

>>
>> Also GetAppConfigDir(False) does not mean hard-coded $HOME/.config/
>> directory. The GetAppConfigDir() adheres to the freedesktop.org
>> directory standards (for unix type
>> environments) that means $HOME/.config/ is simply the default
>> directory if $XDG_CONFIG_HOME environment variable has NOT been set.
>> The user can simply set the $XDG_CONFIG_HOME to point to another
>> location if they please and GetAppConfigDir(False) will use that
>> directory instead.

So what should it be set to keep the current config directory? If $XDG_CONFIG_HOME 
contains the same as $HOME, the result of GetAppConfigDir(False) will be ~/lazarus 
instead of ~/.lazarus.

> 
> I think that
> 
> a) .lazarus was a logical choice for unix.
> 
> b) It is now historically so. Changing this now would mean that the
>    current configuration breaks.
> 
> But if it bothers you, you can do the following:
> 
> ln -s ~/.lazarus ~/.config/lazarus
> 
> or even
> 
> mv ~/.lazarus ~/.config/lazarus
> ln -s ~/.config/lazarus ~/.lazarus
> 
> :-)

Or use some alias, which adds --pcp=~/.config/lazarus to the command to start lazarus.

Vincent





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