In the XDG Base Directory Specification, they suggest that
User-specific executable files may be stored in $HOME/.local/bin.
Of course this is just a recommendation, but they also push for distro to add ~.local/bin to the user path, and I know this is the case by default in at least Ubuntu.
I think it would be beneficial (especially for beginners) to follow the XDG specifications since GNOME, KDE, Xfce and most big distro follow them.
Any opinion?
Also, in regards to Ubuntu/Debian, I believe that ~/bin is added to the path if it exists.
The GNOME, KDE, Xfce are desktop environments though, not really cli environments. So different subject for not desktop/GUI application, right?
For convenience the CLI Walkthrough link is provided here, since it was not provided in the original message: Exercism
It does not mention this at all for the Windows path, while Linux and Mac/OSX both mentions the ~/bin.
Also, the suggestion is “may” and so I personally do not mind it being in the user space at ~/bin, even though I may choose to provide this executable system wide (since I use my laptop as a multi-user environment as intended) Some students do connect to my system to do this work “locally”, and instead of installing it multiple places, they have the executable in a systems location, and only have to set up their tokens.
I presume that anyone that knows how their system works would know that they have options of where the executable should go.
For beginners, are the current directions causing problems for the location of the executable? (I am not a beginner, and so I do not see it as an issue, but that is not surprising, there is a lot of things I simply do not see. Is this really an issue and causing some pain points?)