gsutil ignores XDG basedir spec

Many *nix programs now adhere to the XDG Base Directory Specification. I’d love to see gsutil follow suit, or at least gain some built-in compatibility with it.

Here is the spec itself, and while I don’t use Arch Linux, there’s a good write-up on the wiki that explains the spec a bit more. It also has a list of programs that utilize the spec and workarounds for some of those that don’t.

As it specifically relates to gsutil, it would be nice if the program checked for the configuration file in $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/gsutil/boto (defaulting back to ~/.boto), and for the state directory in $XDG_CACHE_HOME/gsutil (defaulting back to ~/.gsutil).

(I know you can set the BOTO_CONFIG environment variable to set the location of the config file, and inside said config file you can specify state_dir, but when you’re running gsutil through gcloud it’s not always obvious where to do that.)

[thomasmaclean]

Unfortunately we haven’t completed gcloud storage du yet, but we’re planning on starting work on very soon!

[06kellyjac]

Exactly as it says. You’d set BOTO_CONFIG to something e.g. ~/.config/gsutil/config

and within there you’d put state_dir = $XDG_DATA_HOME/gsutil if it accepts vars or manually put state_dir = /home/blah/.local/share/gsutil (I’ve used XDG_DATA_HOME since it’s more appropriate for state than XDG_CACHE_HOME

https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/gsutil/blob/e886dc4da47463d04c7a623720cbb8e317c71ba0/gslib/commands/config.py#L338-L342

Not tried it though