Should not use ~/.VirtualBox as a config folder for Linux hosts

[Andres G. Aragoneses]

There's a freedesktop standard that says that you should use a folder underneath ~/.config/, such as ~/.config/VirtualBox.

More and more applications are switching to this methodology to make configuration migrations easier, please do the same.

The exact standard paper is (which tells you to first check the value of the env var $XDG_CONFIG_HOME): ​http://standards.freedesktop.org/basedir-spec/basedir-spec-0.6.html

[Technologov]

Added myself as CC on this wish.

-Technologov

[wolfy]

Eh, looks like that this issue will never be fixed

[faispasierch]

• ping

[faispasierch]

• ​http://ploum.net/post/207-modify-your-application-to-use-xdg-folders
• ​https://live.gnome.org/GnomeGoals/XDGConfigFolders

[eheintzmann]

According to XDG Base directory specification: User data should go into $XDG_DATA_HOME (which default to ~/.local/share), user preferences should go into $XDG_CONFIG_HOME (which default to ~/.config) and cached data should go to $XDG_CACHE_HOME (which default to ~/.cache). More details at : ​http://ploum.net/post/207-modify-your-application-to-use-xdg-folders ​https://live.gnome.org/GnomeGoals/XDGConfigFolders

Full specification can be found at: ​http://standards.freedesktop.org/basedir-spec/latest/

The Freedesktop.org XDG base directory specification have good de facto adoption. It has been adopted by:

• GNOME ( ​https://live.gnome.org/GnomeGoals/XDGConfigFolders )
• GTK+ ( ​https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=646631 )
• KDE ( ​http://techbase.kde.org/KDE_System_Administration/XDG_Filesystem_Hierarchy#Freedesktop.org_and_Standard_Directories )
• QT ( ​http://harmattan-dev.nokia.com/docs/library/html/qt4/qsettings.html#setPath )
• XFCE ( ​http://docs.xfce.org/xfce/xfce4-session/advanced in Files and Environment Variables )
• LXDE
• Razor-qt
• VLC ( ​https://trac.videolan.org/vlc/ticket/1267 )
• GStreamer ( ​https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=518597 )
• Chrome ( ​http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=16976 )
• many more upstream applications
• Ubuntu ( ​http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/6557/ & ​http://packages.ubuntu.com/fr/source/precise/libxdg-basedir )
• Debian ( ​http://packages.debian.org/squeeze/libxdg-basedir1 )
• Red Hat
• Fedora
• Suse
• many more distributions

I think that VirtualBox should use same locations than the vast majority of Desktop environment and applications.

There are real advantages of following this specification :

• a lot less cluttered $HOME
• Make backups a lot more safer and easier. Backuping your $XDG_DATA_HOME along with your files is enough (or just excluding $XDG_CACHE_HOME)
• A lot easier to reset a default configuration if you want/need it (and without any risk to loose informations). Even for the software itself could choose to reset $XDG_CONFIG_HOME if needed.
• Avoid some strange bugs that happens because you had a old version of some configuration file
• A lot more of flexibility and portability because no path are hardcoded.

[Frank Mehnert]

As of VBox 4.3, the default config directory is ~/.config/VirtualBox if ~/.VirtualBox does not exist. It can be overwritten by setting the XDG_CONFIG_HOME environment variable.