Use of appdirs yields worse behavior on osx

appdirs ignores XDG_CONFIG_HOME on macos and unconditionally wants to put the config in a macos-specific folder location.

Annoyingly there’s an appdirs issue which raises this and they just suggest that you artificially set the OS to be linux instead of darwin if you want linux behavior.

I’m going to also comment on their appdirs, but since this affects the behavior of ptpython specifically, i guess for now it’d be ideal for me if ptpython were do something like

if os.environ.get('XDG_CONFIG_HOME') and appdirs.system == 'darwin':
    appdirs.system = 'linux'

[DanCardin]

I mean, I think that any user who is setting XDG_CONFIG_HOME is clearly attempting to opt into the behavior we’re talking about. It’s not obvious to me why that needs to have any OS significance. At which point the choice of PTPYTHON_CONFIG over XDG_CONFIG_HOME seems kind of arbitrary.

But i’ll take what i can get. Any way to opt into a specific location is a win in my book.

[larrybotha]

Showing my support here for using $XDG_CONFIG_HOME

Something feels weird about appdirs distinction between MacOS and “other Unices”:

What directory should your app use for storing user data? If running on macOS, you should use: ~/Library/Application Support/<AppName> … On Linux (and other Unices) the dir, according to the XDG spec, is: ~/.local/share/<AppName>

Isn’t that odd - what is the significance of ~/Library/Application Support for one Unix distro, while other distros should use a spec written for Unix in general? That seems like magic to me.

Adding an environment variable is a small cost, and I appreciate that the addition has been made to allow for setting a config dir, but it does indeed feel dirty.

Using $XDG_CONFIG_HOME could improve UX in a number of areas:

• Unix-agnostic - switching between distros is trivial
• “just works” for people who already use XDG paths with other apps
• no need to set additional env vars

Is this something the maintainers would be interested in considering?