On Sep 26, 2008, at 12:06 PM, Ted Gould wrote:

On Fri, 2008-09-26 at 18:28 +0200, Daniel Hornung wrote:

On Friday 26 September 2008, Ted Gould wrote:

Well, the part I dislike about that is that we're going to have to keep

that check around for theoretically forever.  Which, even by a little,

slows down our startup.


No, checking (for the standard config dir) is done at startup anyway.  All 

additional checks for the old location would only be done once, since the 

next time ~/.config/Inkscape does already exist.


So then what should happen, move the directory?  What if someone wants

to use their old Inkscape again?


This is a hard problem where you're bound to piss someone off.  I think

that we do need to migrate to the XDG Directories though, as that is

important.


I'm not sure that the best solution isn't to put it in the release notes

and let users make the choice.


With modern OS's, file systems and directory caching, I think we won't see any noticeable delay for the check on old location. So that's probably a non-issue.

When a new version first starts up, I'd suggest that if the target directory does not exist *and* the old directory does, then we create the target directory and copy over settings from the old (with any needed translation of setting values).

If we start up and the target does not exist, and there is no old directory then we just create the new directory.

If we start up and the target does exist then we just use it.

One factor is trying to keep things linked. That is, as things like the list of recent files get updated, we could update the list in the old location. However I think this would 'contaminate' a lot of use scenarios, so it's probably best to just keep things separate.

Then if someone did want to run the new version such that it shared, they just need to launch with the XDG environment variable(s) pointing to the old location and they would be tied. And using XDG will make it easier to keep different versions of Inkscape installed in parallel.