Please follow the XDG Base Dir Spec

Although hledger allows specifying any file for configuration, it would be nice to have sane defaults that follow the spec and falls back to the legacy default locations.

There is a nice haskell library that implements this.

[simonmichael]

Thanks @BilLOPGVkPPn8z0JGJhgiAGNo9YAqpk5ruChl0F . Would you care to sketch out a design ? Eg what would change in hledger, and how would we handle the transition.

[simonmichael]

Also, how would you describe the impact/cost of the current behaviour ? Since we don't currently claim to follow that spec, perhaps this is more of a wish than a bug ? Ie how urgent/important is it.

Eg what would change in hledger, and how would we handle the transition.

XDG Base Dir env vars should be used if present, if not, fall back to the original defaults. Note that ~/.config, ~/.local/share, etc. would be better fallbacks and any sort of home pollution should be a last resort, but this requires breaking backwards compatability.

I'm hesitant to be more concrete as I'm not familiar with the internals of this project (and Haskell), but it seems that the ledger file should be searched for at "$XDG_DATA_HOME"/hledger.journal by default. Since hledger-ui for example does not create the file if missing, it should just be a single if statement (if that's idiomatic Haskell) to check if the relevant XDG Base Dir env vars are present, and if they are not, behave exactly the way hledger behaves right now (unless full compliance to the spec is desired).

Also, how would you describe the impact/cost of the current behaviour ?

The cost of the current behavior is home pollution and not following the freedesktop.org spec, which among other aspects of Linux as a desktop OS, standardizes how applications should interact with the filesystem for configuration, caching, storing data, etc.

Since we don't currently claim to follow that spec, perhaps this is more of a wish than a bug ?

I thought "bug" was a more appropriate label since any application that supports Linux released after 2000 should follow the standard agreed upon by all major players in the Linux desktop world, but I think it's really up to how much the maintainers/users care. If it is a bug I would say it's a minor one.

Ie how urgent/important is it.

Since no one else in the plaintext accounting ecosystem has ever raised such an issue, I would say that urgency and importance is low. An issue however is that the longer it's not followed, the more difficult it becomes to follow in the future.

[simonmichael]

Thanks for the input. I'm probably in favour of moving in this direction, especially if someone wants to work on it. This has potentially a lot of details to be worked through. I'm certainly interested in exploring it further.

Let me cherry-pick one issue, the default location of the journal file.

• There is a default location so that new users can run "hledger add" and then the other hledger commands without needing any configuration.
• I picked the home directory for simplicity and also because your financial journal is important data and I didn't want it getting lost or accidentally deleted from being deep in some hidden dot directory.
• I gave it a dotted name (.hledger.journal) so that it wouldn't be so obvious as to be annoying when you're not using it. Now I think I should have chosen a non-dotted name - if it's important data then obvious is good.
• I still have doubts about storing this valuable file in a hidden subdirectory, where users might have trouble finding it or preserving it. hledger aims to be useful also to non-technical users.
• On windows, the user's home directory moves around, based on OS version and other things. I wouldn't want to do anything that makes this file harder to find on windows.

To flesh this out, here are the two use cases I've been thinking of:

1. A new user starts using hledger via add/iadd commands, following tutorials, and never thinks about where the data goes. Some folks will skip this step.
2. Later on they want to use version control, or multiple files (included journals, csv files, csv rules..) which are best kept together, or they want to use an encrypted folder, or whatever. At this point they move the default file ($HOME/.hledger.journal) to its new location, and they deal with configuring the LEDGER_FILE environment variable (in all the environments where it's needed; or setting up command aliases to achieve the same effect).

Thanks so much for looking in this, the biggest disappointment with the plaintext accounting ecosystem has been how every tool seems to just dump everything into my home folder, I'm glad to see serious consideration.

I see what you mean about keeping the journal file location simple. However, with what I've proposed (leaning towards legacy fallback to be pragmatic) I don't think that's an issue at all. If there are no XDG base dir env vars present, nothing would change. Unless I'm mistaken, these env vars must be set manually, so a user that does not care would not have these env vars. I would be very happy with this behavior, even if it didn't fall back to ~/.local/share and all that.

So in terms of the two use cases you mentioned:

1. New users that do not care about the location - nothing changes
2. Users that are more involved with the files - setting yet another env var becomes unnecessary