Should bzr aliases possibly be in their own file?

[Michael Gliwinski]

On Thursday 14 Oct 2010 06:22:38 Martin Pool wrote:
> On 14 October 2010 10:22, Tom Browder <tom.browder at gmail.com> wrote:
> > On Wed, Oct 13, 2010 at 18:17, Tom Browder <tom.browder at gmail.com> wrote:
> >> On Wed, Oct 13, 2010 at 18:00, Martin Pool <mbp at canonical.com> wrote:
> >>> Hi Tom,
> >>> 
> >>> I think the desire to split up config files so they can be merged and
> >>> copied doesn't need to be specific to aliases.  Perhaps we should have
> >>> a conf.d directory, and read in the contents of all files within it.
> > 
> > Sorry, I sent too soon, and Philip's e-mail crossed mine.  Once more:
> > 
> > Martin that sounds good, and that would satisfy system-wide values and
> > eliminate the need for an environment variable.
> > 
> > But what about user changes?  I still like the idea of environment
> > variables for the location of that file or files or directory in order
> > to override any default.  At the moment I use symbolic links to work
> > around that.
> 
> I think we would have a system and per-user configuration directory,
> and then a defined ordering within them.

All this sounds awesome, good to see things happening here.

While talking about config files, etc. have you considered the XDG base 
directory specification [1]?  More and more programs are moving to it as it 
provides some compelling benefits.  Example:

 - system and user specific dirs with well defined precedence, overridable via 
environment variables
 - separation of real config data from caches, etc. allows e.g. easier backups 
or versioning of config files

It is simple-enough to implement if you don't want additional dependencies but 
there is also the PyXDG library for accessing freedesktop.org standards 
(including base dir spec) [2].


[1] http://standards.freedesktop.org/basedir-spec/basedir-spec-latest.html
[2] http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/pyxdg


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Michael Gliwinski
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