Bug 49092

Hi,

I'm not so sure about using xdg dirs, for the following reasons:

1) Currently spice-vdagent does not have a glib dependency
2) ~/.spice-vdagent is only used for the log file and the xdg spec says nothing about log files
3) While using the xdg dirs when starting from scratch may make sense, right now people are used to looking for the log file under ~/.spice-vdagent, I think moving it around is counter productive.

I'm going to leave this bug open for now, awaiting feedback from other developers / further discussion, but I don't plan to fix this at this time.

Regards,

Hans

The XDG standard has no dependence on glib. I was just pointing out convenience functions. The spec does not mention log files directly of course. It talks about data directories plenty though :)

We just really don't want to be littering in the home directory.

(In reply to comment #2)
> The XDG standard has no dependence on glib. I was just pointing out convenience
> functions.

I know. But implementing it without the convenience functions is a bit of work, so if we go the xdg way it is really nice to have them.

> The spec does not mention log files directly of course. It talks
> about data directories plenty though :)

Right and data files != log files, specifically the spec uses ~/.local/share as data directory,
notice the share part there, and how the hierarchy below it mirrors /usr/share. Also notice how we don't put global log-files in /usr/share but in /var/log!

> We just really don't want to be littering in the home directory.

And I really want the user to be able to easily find the log file if the needs arrive.

Thinking about it a bit more. I think probably g_get_user_cache_dir() or equivalent is the right choice. So something like:

.cache/spice-vdagent/log

(In reply to comment #4)
> Thinking about it a bit more. I think probably g_get_user_cache_dir() or
> equivalent is the right choice. So something like:
> 
> .cache/spice-vdagent/log

Yes, because a .cache dir is the first place a user would look for a log file. I'm sorry but it is important that when the user needs it the log file can easily be found. Maybe a ~/.log dir would work, but that does not seem to be part of the xdg spec. Since this discussion does not seem to be going anywhere I'm going to close this bug.

Users don't look in dot files either do they?

Perhaps a better solution is to use the systemd journal or syslog.

Yes I will look into switching to using syslog

git master has been converted to using syslog for logging, removing the usage of the ~/.spice-vdagent dir, see: http://cgit.freedesktop.org/spice/linux/vd_agent for details.