[xmonad] darcs patch: Separate source and build directories (and 1 more)

[Carsten Mattner]

On Wed, Jun 27, 2012 at 9:29 AM, Daniel Trstenjak
<daniel.trstenjak at googlemail.com> wrote:
>
>> An alternative location could be ~/.cache/xmonad.
>> yi - possibly via dyre - stores stuff in ~/.cache/yi.
>
> Yes, I thought about it, but only putting the build files in a
> freedesktop conforming directory could be perhaps confusing, and I
> didn't wanted to change the configuration/source directory for backward
> compatibility reasons.
>
> Perhaps having the search order ["~/.config/xmonad", "~/.xmonad"] for
> configuration/source files could solve that issue.
>
> Looking at the 'XDG Base Directory Specification'[1], I don't know if
> the cache directory is the right one, because of: "... user-specific
>>>> non-essential <<< (cached) data should be written."
>
> It's also not that clear what the difference is between $XDG_CACHE_HOME and
> $XDG_RUNTIME_DIR.
>
> There's also $XDG_DATA_HOME, which default value is "~/.local/share",
> which seems quite strange for user specific data.
>
> The XDG seems to be the kind of specification which might create more
> issues than it solves.

That's a natural problem when you try to put labels/tags on stuff and
sort it into buckets (folders). It's often not so clear.

> [1] http://standards.freedesktop.org/basedir-spec/basedir-spec-latest.html

Using either XDG_CACHE_HOME or XDG_RUNTIME_DIR strikes me as
preferable over ~/.xmonad_build.