XDG dirs

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Apr 16, 2014, at 11:08, Jonathan Koren <jonathan at robotmonkeys.net> wrote:

> 
> I recently removed, then reinstalled, MacPorts 2.2.1 trying to diagnose a problem with glib. The problem was that when meld tried to write into the director glib’s g_get_user_dir(), it would get a a permission denied because this directory was under /opt/local/share, which is a system directory.
> 
> After some digging, I found that MacPorts modified my .tcshrc with three variables that override the glib defaults. These variables, and their values are:
> 
> 	setenv XDG_DATA_DIRS   /opt/local/share
> 	setenv XDG_DATA_HOME   /opt/local/share
> 	setenv XDG_CONFIG_DIRS /opt/local/etc/xdg
> 
> The problem is that these XDG directories are all supposed to be user specific, not system specific. I don’t know why MacPorts picked these values, but they’re clearly wrong. Simply removing these lines caused glib to revert back to reasonable defaults.
> 
> This looks like a bug in the install script. I don’t know who else is having this problem, but the install scripts should never be using these values for these directories, since these directories should never writable by normal users. In fact, I suspect that the system will work just fine without setting these variables at all.

MacPorts didn’t do that. The only thing the MacPorts installer does to your shell startup script is to add the MacPorts prefix to the PATH, and set MANDIR and DISPLAY if needed (usually not needed).