History in XDG_DATA_HOME, configurable via Environment variable

[eliminmax]

I created a modified version of 0.12.8, then ported my changes to 0.12.9, that changes the history file path to have the following behavior:

If $HISTFILE_OIL/$HISTFILE_OSH environment variable for the current language is set, use that.
Otherwise, if $XDG_DATA_HOME is set, save to "$XDG_DATA_HOME"/oil/history_oil or "$XDG_DATA_HOME"/oil/history_osh.
If neither option is set, fall back to ~/.local/share/oil/history_oil or ~/.local/share/oil/history_osh.

[andychu]

Thanks for the PR! I assume you're want this because you don't want the history file in ~/.local/share?

Is XDG_DATA_HOME sufficient for your use case? If so then I would prefer to limit it to that (e.g. because more features means more things to document, and this isn't documented yet)

[eliminmax]

Exactly - I prefer to keep any history files in one directory (specifically ~/.local/share/histfiles). If you'd rather not include that functionality, that's fine.

[andychu]

OK sounds good, please remove the other env var and just use XDG_DATA_HOME

And revert the oil-version.txt change -- that is only for releases

Thank you

[andychu]

Hm actually it sounds like XDG_DATA_HOME isn't enough if you want ~/.local/share/histfiles ?

Setting that would mean a lot of other non-history data is stored there too

[eliminmax]

Using this patch, set the HISTFILE_OSH and HISTFILE_OIL variables to point to ~/.local/share/histfiles/osh and ~/.local/share/histfiles/oil, respectively, and set similar variables or configuration options for other programs. That's why I wanted the other environment variables to be available as options.

[eliminmax]

I noticed, once I installed my patched version on a bare-bones Linux From Scratch system I'd made, that if the directory of the history file is missing, regardless of what it is, it silently fails to save history, so I think my patch needs a bit more work anyway - will close for now, and reopen once I've finished my college finals and had a chance to fix that.

[andychu]

Hm what shell do you normally use, and how do you point it at your histfiles dir?

Hm looks like bash and zsh BOTH support the $HISTFILE env variable

https://linuxhint.com/check-zsh-history/

But does that mean bash and zsh overlap? I don't think they can actually read from the same file

---

I think there is something to do here, but I'm not sure what the right behavior is

[eliminmax]

I usually use bash with $HISTFILE set to ~/.local/share/histfiles/bash in my .bashrc file. I think that because its set in the rc file and not exported, they avoid conflict

[andychu]

I think one thing we could do is have OSH support plain $HISTFILE and Oil support something else

[andychu]

Hi, I'm thinking about this again. I'm thinking of doing it like this:

• OSH respects $HISTFILE , which is a POSIX variable, and default is ~/.config/oils/osh_history
• YSH respects $HISTFILE_YSH , default is ~/.config/oils/ysh_history

We can do XDG_DATA_HOME later, but I wonder if that is enough for your use case ?

(Project was slightly renamed - https://www.oilshell.org/blog/2023/03/rename.html )

[andychu]

Although I guess ~/.local/share/oils/{osh,ysh}_history can be considered cleaner, since it's not config

bash and zsh put it in ~

Fish follows that style, so I think we can do that

ls ~/.local/share/fish/
fish_history  generated_completions/