Re: Cleaning up and structuring user-emacs-directory

[Stefan Monnier]

Yuan Fu [2020-08-20 10:56:28] wrote:

>> On Aug 19, 2020, at 11:09 PM, Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> wrote:
>> 
>> [[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
>> [[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
>> [[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]
>> 
>>> 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.
>> 
>
> I don’t know about the concrete definition, but some built-in examples 
> includes:
>
> recentf-save-file
> bookmark-default-file
> savehist-file
> project-list-file

ecomplete-database-file


        Stefan