Re: Cleaning up and structuring user-emacs-directory

[Richard Stallman]

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  > In short, the approach that I proposed divides up `user-emacs-directory'
  > into multiple subdirectories and keeps `user-emacs-directory' as the
  > all-in-one source of a user's Emacs files, while the XDG Base Directory
  > approach as suggested by Gunnar would imply keeping only configuration
  > files in `user-emacs-directory', and moving data and cache files to
  > "$XDG_DATA_HOME/emacs/" and "$XDG_CACHE_HOME/emacs/" respectively, where
  > 'XDG_DATA_HOME' defaults to "~/.local/share" and 'XDG_CACHE_HOME' to
  > "~/.cache".

There is a benefit to putting all cache files in ~/.cache.  For
instance, you know where to find all the files you can safely delete,
regardless of which program made them.

What concretely are "data" files, for Emacs?  I don't know where in
the sources to look for that info.  Can you mention a few examples and
what data they contain?  With specifics, we can see the concrete
advantage of one choice or the other.  With only the abstraction "data
files", we can see only at the level of abstractions, and that is a sort
of blindness that can lead to bad decisions.



-- 
Dr Richard Stallman
Chief GNUisance of the GNU Project (https://gnu.org)
Founder, Free Software Foundation (https://fsf.org)
Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org)