[Merkaartor] Using XDG-compliant directories for tile cache, config, etc

Samat K Jain lists at samat.org
Tue Apr 27 08:00:01 BST 2010


I've been using TMS quite a bit recently, and have setup merkaartor to cache 
an unlimited amount of tiles. This has had unintended effects with my backup 
system, which is now trying to backup hundreds of megabytes of files that 
don't need to be backed up. While adding an exception for 
~/.QMapControlCache/, the default location for tile storage, it made me wonder 
why this location was chosen. A quick search on Google seems to imply that 
only merkaartor uses this directory.

Would ~/.cache/merkaartor/ be a better location? On that note, why not also 
move configuration from ~/.merkaartor/ to ~/.config/merkaartor/?

Such directories are recommended by the XDG basedir spec:

  http://standards.freedesktop.org/basedir-spec/latest/ar01s03.html

The idea is to separate configuration, non-cacheable data, and cachable data 
and to do it in a way that it is standardized between applications, and easy 
to manage. I.e. in my backup situation above, if merkaartor stored its caches 
in this directory, I'd not have to add a special exception.

Is this something people are interested in? With the approaching 0.16 major 
release, this is the ideal time to introduce such a change.

-- 
Samat K Jain <http://samat.org/> | GPG: 0x4A456FBA

I know only that what is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral 
is what you feel bad after. 
-- Ernest Hemingway (205)
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