Cannot prepend user-defined dir to XDG_CONFIG_DIRS

[Daniel Richard G.]

Binary package hint: gdm

This is a wishlist item, filed against gdm 2.30.0-0ubuntu5 in Ubuntu Lucid.

I use the Xubuntu desktop. XDG_CONFIG_DIRS is set in /etc/X11/Xsession.d/60xdg_path-on-session (a file provided by gdm) to "/etc/xdg/xdg-xubuntu:/etc/xdg" (if I haven't set X_D_G myself beforehand).

What I want to do, however, is set it to something like "$HOME/.my-xdg:/etc/xdg/xdg-xubuntu:/etc/xdg". That is, I want to prepend my own directory to the variable. (The idea is to start with my preferred default settings with an empty ~/.config directory, when I'm starting a brand-new user account. I do this at every new Ubuntu release, and it's less work to hand-maintain some cut-down config files in ~/.my-xdg/ than to go through all the GUI widgets necessary to set my desired settings every six months.)

The problem is that, short of using your own ~/.xsession file, there is no way to do this. You can't set/tweak X_D_G accordingly in ~/.profile or ~/.xsessionrc, because those are read before 60xdg_path-on-session. And you can't change what 60xdg_path-on-session does, unconditionally adding the /etc/xdg/... directory as the very first element.

This makes it basically infeasible for a user to take advantage of a very useful aspect of the XDG Base Directory system.

[Charlie Kravetz (cjkgeek)]

 Thanks for reporting this bug and any supporting documentation. Since this bug has enough information provided for a developer to begin work, I'm going to mark it as confirmed and let them handle it from here. Thanks for taking the time to make Ubuntu better!