Tox should adhere to the XDG BaseDir standard on Linux and possibly OS X

[pytoxbot]

• Bitbucket: https://bitbucket.org/hpk42/tox/issue/346
• Originally reported by: SShrike
• Originally created at: 2016-07-14T23:40:36.512

You can find the specification here.

This blog post lists the advantages of using the XDG Base Directory Specification as follows:

• $HOME is a lot less cluttered.
• Backups are a lot more safer and easier (you know that creating a backup of your $XDG_DATA_HOME along with your files is enough).
• A lot easier to reset a default configuration if you want/need it (and without any risk of losing information).
• Avoid some strange bugs that happen because you had a old version of some configuration file.
• It is a lot more flexible and portable because no paths are hard-coded. You can use the XDG library that does the job for you or, if you don’t want the dependency, implementing the XDG specification is only a few lines of code.

For example, what is currently ~/.tox/distshare would be ~/.cache/tox/distshare or something similar.

[pytoxbot]

Original comment by @hpk42

what do you suggest as behaviour for windows? or does XDG specify that as well?

[obestwalter]

Hi @hpk42 Another question: distshare is marked as deprecated, so why should we change this at all? Question would rather be, when do wo throw this out, or do we deprecate the deprecation?

[gaborbernat]

@obestwalter judging from the low interest and the fact of deprecation of distshare I would say let's close this for now.

[jleclanche]

When is distshare actually going away in that case?

[gaborbernat]

the options it's marked as deprecated for 2 years now, so whenever we decide to do so 😃

[jleclanche]

@gaborbernat The issue really is that "there's a .tox directory in $HOME", so personally I'm happy with the PR not getting merged if distshare actually goes away -- but leaving it in without merging the PR, on the premise that it'll go away "some day" is kinda weird imo.

[obestwalter]

Hi @jleclanche, the reason the PR never got merged is that the question how this should behave on Windows was never addressed. There was another problem pointed out in the PR comments that wasn't addressed also. So the assumption was that the interest in getting this merged was not big enough to put in some more work in and address those issues.

Maybe we should talk about the question what we do with distshare first and then decide if we actually need that global directory at all, wether it is directly in $HOME then or somewhere else.

[ntninja]

So, has the question on whether ~/.tox/distshare will continue to be used been resolved in the meantime?

[gaborbernat]

We don't plan to go ahead with using distshare.

[zacchiro]

A few years later, it looks like present-day tox still creates ~/.tox/distshare/ on every run, or am I missing a way to avoid that from happening / making it happen somewhere under ~/.local/share/tox/distshare instead?

[gaborbernat]

I'm planning to remove this feature in tox 4, which would solve it.