#110 Use of XDG Base Directory Specification

[Brot]

bogofilter should follow the XDG Base Directory Specification for the configuration/data directory on Linux.
You can find more information here: http://standards.freedesktop.org/basedir-spec/basedir-spec-latest.html

On my system I found the folder ~/.bogofilter which should not be under my home root

[David Relson]

The XDG Base Directory Specification is for desktop applications such
as Gnome and KDE apps. Bogofilter is a server application, not a
desktop application. Consequently this standard isn't applicable

[Hans Meier]

May have been the case 2009, not so today. Neither is XDG only for desktop applications (main goal is to ease backups) nor is bogofilter only a server application (desktop clients use it, since providers have none/useless filters).
Please reconsider to support it at least partially:

• if $XDG_CONFIG_HOME is not set -> use ~/.bogofilter
• if $XDG_CONFIG_HOME is set -> use $XDG_CONFIG_HOME
• Users can migrate themselves.

Right now makes my life hard, since bogofilter home can only be moved with cli-arguments, needs a wrapper or a rewrite of my backup-script.

[Matthias Andree]

Hans, sorry for being blunt here. I am pretty much unimpressed by useless insistence on by-proxy arguments.

I see nothing wrong with David's assessment, and there are more reasons to keep existing practice rather than change it.

For one, bogofilter's personality has not changed, and if your Desktop client does not provide the features you expect of it, talk to its maintainer, not to the bogofilter maintainer.
You have not presented any valid and corroborated reasons why things are different 12 years later, or why they would have to change today.

Since David's passing, I am the sole maintainer of bogofilter, and I refuse to make the behavior inconsistent with respect to decade-long practice and depend on the presence or absence of environment variables, and to invalidate all the existing 2nd-source documentation. I have just decided that bogofilter shall not heed XDG_CONFIG_HOME for the foreseeable future, and that it will instead continue to default to ~/.bogofilter.

Your convenience around command-line utilities shall not change bogofilter behavior in a way that astonishes other users. If bogofilter does not suit your needs, you are free to stop using it.

Your Desktop client - whichever that is - can use command-line arguments to override the bogofilter home directory, but I advise against deviating. This just causes confusions in other support channels that are unaware of such changes.