Re^4: File::XDG on varying platforms

NERDVANA wrote:

...But also, I think you want the home directory on cygwin to be /cygdrive/c/Users/somia so that cygwin tools don't get confused by "C:".

Again, perceptive. Yeah, some things would probably be easier, but the vast majority of Cygwin-provided tools work just fine with mixed or "hybrid" absolute paths using a volume letter and colon and slashes instead of backslashes, like C:/Users/somia. One cygwin tool that does break is GnuPG (gpg), so with cpan or its competition, I cannot verify download CPAN packages that have been uploaded with a verifying-key. It's something I'd like to have working but not very important in my big picture.

If I set up another Windows system I will probably try using the unix-style pathname for my home directory. At this point I've got a lot of things that might break if I changed to that.

And, yes, %APPDATA% is set to C:\Users\somia\AppData\Roaming by default. The person who wrote File::XDG apparently did not want to use the Roaming, but instead chose Local.

For someone who has implied he doesn't use Windows, you seem to know rather a lot ;-)

May 28, 2025 at 02:45 UTC

Comment on Re^4: File::XDG on varying platforms

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Re^5: File::XDG on varying platforms by NERDVANA (Priest) on May 28, 2025 at 23:10 UTC
For someone who has implied he doesn't use Windows, you seem to know rather a lot ;-) Heh, well from 1995-2000 I didn't know Linux existed. From 2000-2004 I was using a Windows desktop with Cygwin and "User Mode Linux" (kind of like today's Windows Subsystem for Linux) to run native Linux apps while also running a FreeBSD server to offload persistent things like file shares. It was pretty cool - I had the Cygwin X server and programs running in User Mode Linux could connect to it and render windows right alongside my Windows apps. From 2004-2018 I had what I called a "hybrid desktop" where Windows got two monitors and Linux got one monitor and I had a gigabit crossover cable between them for my samba shares and used Synergy to let my mouse roam from one monitor to the other giving me seamless copy/paste between Windows and Linux desktops. I no longer needed much from cygwin because a full half of my desktop was actual Linux and all the files of any importance were on Linux. By the end of that, Windows had 2 monitors and Linux had 4 monitors, since almost everything was browser-based, and my laptop was linux-only, and even the Windows half was a dual-boot with Linux. I was also doing quite a lot of software to support Windows in the 2007-2011 years, and from 2015-2022 I was sysadmin for a Windows Server, so I had to keep dealing with it even if my workstation was migrating away from it. In 2018 I had found Linux substitutes for pretty much every Windows app I previously needed for work, and switched to using Linux as my daily driver and only booting into Windows to play games. So at that point, I was no longer customizing Windows for development work, or at all, really, since I don't care what the experience is like for the few minutes it takes me to open a video game. When Windows 11 came out and started spamming me with advertisements and latest gossip-news and giving me Bing results when I was trying to search for Control Panel applets, I spent a few hours researching how to turn all that off permanently by uninstalling Windows components. When it all came back the next month because MS helpfully re-installed all those components without my permission, I decided I was done with it forever to the greatest degree possible. I do still have my dual-boot with windows 11, kept for the sole purpose of playing StarCraft II which I can never get to run reliably in Wine, but I haven't had time to play in nearly a year, so that's pretty much the end of Windows for me. ...with the exception that I do have a VM with Windows 10 so that I can test my published cpan modules on Win32. Also my wife still has a windows laptop, so it's never totally gone.	[reply]
Re^6: File::XDG on varying platforms by Intrepid (Curate) on May 29, 2025 at 18:04 UTC
NERDVANA wrote: When Windows 11 came out and started spamming me with advertisements and latest gossip-news and giving me Bing results when I was trying to search for Control Panel applets, I spent a few hours researching how to turn all that off permanently by uninstalling Windows components. When it all came back the next month because MS helpfully re-installed all those components without my permission ... . Oi! That's right, that's M$'s failing right there. Windows 10 is bad, too. I don't think any flavor of Gnu/Linux would do something like that; you might get boatloads of unasked-for dependencies when trying to install something, but you always get shown what will happen and have the option to cancel the installation. I'm thinking of how apt works. Compared to M$, I love apt. Then there's the constant churn in how to get to control panel settings; what somebody reported as working for them (say, on SuperUser, for example) a couple years ago doesn't work today. Really, really annoying. Let's try to masquerade as people using PMo to discuss Perl: here's a one-liner I recently found on my own home node that I wrote years ago; try it out (works in the cygwin bash shell; there's a set of tweaks to get it to work in a CMD shell but I'm not going to show that): `perl -MWin32 -le 'my @ds=grep {/CSIDL_/} @{ [keys %Win32::] }; ' \ -e 'do {printf qq/%31s => %s\n/, $_, Win32::GetFolderPath(&{$Win32:: +{$_}}) }'\ -e 'for map { $_->[0] } sort {$a->[1] <=> $b->[1]} map { [$_,&{$Win3 +2::{$_}}] } @ds'` [download] Yes, that's a Schwartzian transform hiding in there ;-).	[reply] [d/l]