[kondor6c]

Why not _shame_ openssh? Or vim? Or emacs? I would advise not calling for shame on any of these projects because they have a pattern to support that has been in place longer than the XDG standard has been in place. You can change gnupg's home dir, but it would break a lot of currently functional setups if it just moved.

[yjftsjthsd-h]

I'm personally willing to give SSH a partial pass because I feel like having it separate makes it easier to reason about from a security perspective (this would also apply to GPG).

For vim... yeah, AFAIK "vim" does that, but neovim uses ~/.config/nvim :)

And to your general point... yes, many of these programs predate XDG. I happily support keeping them backwards compatible (which should be easy; checking multiple places in order is a time-honored tradition). But I honestly don't think this was a good idea even decades ago, and "we've always done it this way" is a terrible reason to not even support a newer, cleaner approach. Again, there's no reason to break existing systems; just support an additional location, probably make it the default, and everyone will be happy.

[fxfan]

I guess I was being nice to old programs. Also, these are programs that a lot of external tools interact with. Nobody cares about where firefox stores its data- except the now almost dead flash plugin.

[kondor6c]

Yes, very good point I do think that the older programs/projects have to plan a migration which really can be challenging. I think there are some that might care for example selenium might have the mozilla directory as a default and some might hard code it. The orchestration of such a change is difficult because I don't think too many people read changelog or really keep up with upstream modifications.

Good thoughts

[gnomewascool]

> You can change gnupg's home dir, but it would break a lot of currently functional setups if it just moved.

You can just change the default: if .gnupg exists, write everything to it. If not, write to $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/gnupg/ and $XDG_DATA_HOME/gnupg/ as appropriate (deciding how to carry out the split is not obvious, but can be done).

I agree, though, that calling it "shaming" is neither justified, nor useful.

[afiori]

> (deciding how to carry out the split is not obvious, but can be done).

For this reason I like better the windows distinction, that (if I understand in correctly) distinguishes between machine-dependent files and machine independent files. for something like gnupg I would not really say what is data and what is configuration