Adding ~/.local/bin to default PATH

[Miloslav Trmač]

On Wed, Jul 27, 2011 at 6:54 PM, Genes MailLists <lists at sapience.com> wrote:
> On 07/27/2011 12:19 PM, Lennart Poettering wrote:
>> On Wed, 27.07.11 17:40, Roman Rakus (rrakus at redhat.com) wrote:
>>
>>>
>>> Hi all,
>>> from the discussion here, I'm tempted to revert the change. Any objections?
>>
>> Yes. I am for keeping it in, and have prepped a patch for XDG basedir to
>> make it official.
>
>  What actually is the benefit of doing this? Why does xdg need the shell
> have the PATH env include this - if xdg wants to use a fixed path - then
> should it not use a fixed path and not require specific PATH environment
> anyway?
Now that you mention a "fixed path"... all of the basedir-spec
directories are specified by environment variables (with, AFAICS, no
clear definition of who sets the variables and when), with ~/.local
being only a default path for some of the directories.  So, if we
wanted to add a path and be consistent with XDG basedir spec, simply
adding ~/.local/bin would be incorrect - and it's not clear to me that
it is at all possible to do it correctly in ~/.bash_profile.

(And of course, the thing to standardize would not be "bin", but a
subdirectory structure as defined by the GNU standards for --prefix.)
   Mirek