portable home directories search paths

[Kodiman]

AppImage is excellent! new feature: please have the runtime also look for portable home directories with the short app name (such as the prefix or [Desktop Entry] Name=). for example.

Firefox.AppImage.home
Firefox.AppImage.config

having that allows keeping settings when auto upgrading app versions.

the logic can be to first search for portable home directories by filename (as you do now) and if not found then search by short app name (such as the prefix and/or "desktop-entry-name").

much appreciated. thanks.

[probonopd]

Currently a .desktop file is optional for an AppImage, and runtime.c does not know how to parse .desktop files. The code at the moment is incredibly simple:

AppImageKit/runtime.c

Lines 478 to 495 in e6a37a2

	char portable_home_dir[2048];
	char portable_config_dir[2048];
	/* If there is a directory with the same name as the AppImage plus ".home", then export $HOME */
	strcpy (portable_home_dir, fullpath);
	strcat (portable_home_dir, ".home");
	if(is_writable_directory(portable_home_dir)){
	printf("Setting $HOME to %s\n", portable_home_dir);
	setenv("HOME",portable_home_dir,1);
	}
	/* If there is a directory with the same name as the AppImage plus ".config", then export $XDG_CONFIG_HOME */
	strcpy (portable_config_dir, fullpath);
	strcat (portable_config_dir, ".config");
	if(is_writable_directory(portable_config_dir)){
	printf("Setting $XDG_CONFIG_HOME to %s\n", portable_config_dir);
	setenv("XDG_CONFIG_HOME",portable_config_dir,1);
	}

To add this functionality, we would have to

• Add desktop file parsing to runtime.c
• Check for the existence of a .desktop file
• Export the variables accordingly

Is anyone else interested in this feature, and more importantly, is anyone willing to implement it?

[Kodiman]

hi, i'm overloaded with work projects. if exporting desktop file is too hard, then as a start maybe you can parse the prefix of the filename (before the dash). whatever is easy for you. thanks.

[azubieta]

I guess that the current implementation is good enough. Can we close this issue?

[TheAssassin]

I'd keep it open as a "wishlist" feature. It sounds useful, but is low prio.

[probonopd]

Note that the same can be achieved by renaming the AppImage to Firefox.AppImage. So I agree, we shold not work on this since we have far more important things to do; but in case @Kodiman or someone else wants to implement this, we would certainly be open to a pull request. Thanks.