Hi Deri,
Programs should not create arbitrary directories in $HOME. That was
commonplace 20 or 30 years ago, but is frowned upon nowadays.
The location of such a directory depends on its lifetime and contents:
* If its lifetime is shorter than the process duration, that is, if
it is no longer relevant once the process terminated, it should be
under $TMPDIR, not under $HOME. If TMPDIR is not set, use /tmp
instead of $TMPDIR.
* Otherwise:
- If it contains configuration that the user should be able to
modify (either via a text editor or via an appropriate program),
it should be $HOME/.config/<program>/ (or $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/<program>/
if that environment variable is set [1]).
- If it contains data that may be deleted and is persisted only to
provide a speedup, it should be $HOME/.cache/<program>/
(or $XDG_CACHE_HOME/<program>/ if that environment variable is set [1]).
- If it contains other data, that is neither configuration nor
deletable (for example, log files, user spell-check customizations,
and many more), it should be $HOME/.local/share/<program>/
(or $XDG_DATA_HOME/<program>/ if thet environment variable is set [1]).
The purpose of this specification [1] is that users
- have an easy way of erasing all caches,
- can have all their user data on an USB stick, needing to set only 3 or 4
environment variables.
That's the de-facto standard nowadays.
Bruno
[1] https://specifications.freedesktop.org/basedir/latest/
