gimp makes ~/.thumbnails/ in spite of XDG location already existing

[John Drinkwater]

john@joran ~ ❯ gimp --version
GNU Image Manipulation Program version 2.8.14

When writing a file, gimp will create a directory (~/.thumbnails) to write thumbnails into despite XDG locations being defined (XDG_CACHE_HOME="/home/john/settings/cache"), and the location existing and containing files already:

john@joran ~ ❯ ls $XDG_CACHE_HOME/thumbnails
fail/ large/ normal/ gnome-exe-thumbnailer.cfg gnome-exe-thumbnailer.files

Can confirm that putting this into gimprc:
(thumbnail-size none)
disables the location being created, but then thumbnails are not generated either

From browsing their bugzilla, https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=646644 this was filed and meant to be fixed.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Gabriel Rauter (raetiacorvus)]

Cant find the bug report right now, but gimp is changing to xdg base path with the 2.10 release.
The feature is already in the dev branch: http://wiki.gimp.org/wiki/Roadmap

[Gabriel Rauter (raetiacorvus)]

I did overlook that the bugreporter already linked to the coresponding Bug Upstream. If you take a closer look at that bugreport you see that the fix is targeted for Gimp 2.10