System wide settings as in XDG dir spec are ignored

[Henkjan]

My understanding of the FreeDesktop XDG specification (https://standards.freedesktop.org/basedir-spec/basedir-spec-latest.html) is that files in "$XDG_CONFIG_DIRS/subdir/filename" defaulting to /etc/xdg/subdir/filename should be used as a template when generating files in the user ~/.config directory. Currently Plank fails to do this correctly.

The bug is that Plank ignores settings placed in the /etc/xdg/plank/ directory when populating the configuration in ~/.config on first start of Plank.

To Test: move existing plank configuration from ~/.config/plank to /etc/xdg/plank removing the plank directory from the home directory in the process. A log-out/log-in will show that those files are not recreated in ~/.config as they should be according to XDG spec.

The reason that this is a problem is that as a result there is no way easy way to provide a default system-wide configuration for Plank as files placed in /etc/skel are only used when creating new users. That default config isn't restored when deleting .config in contrast to configuration files that are placed in /etc/xdg.

The expected behavior would be that configuration files placed in /etc/xdg/plank get copied to ~/.config/plank when those files do not exist in $XDG_CONFIG_DIR on the first start of Plank (the directory structure and content would be the same as now in ~/.config/plank).

System-info:
Plank version: 0.11.4
Distro: Void Linux; Slackware (not relevant to the bug
Desktop: xfce

[Henkjan (hgersen)]

I had missed that with version 11 has switched to a dconf style configuration approach, i.e. /etc/dconf should do what I intended.

For that reason bug closed as invalid.