Comment 0 for bug 1575053

Snap package developers should be encouraged to store user data according to the XDG Base Directory Specification [1][2].

I installed the "notes" app via snap on a Xenial desktop:

    sudo snap install notes

and launched it using the snap wrapper script "/snap/bin/notes". The script created a directory "$HOME/snap/notes/1", resulting in the placement of the directory named "snap" directly under my home directory, a situation that is undesirable for two reasons:

- The XDG spec calls for user data to be stored under "$HOME/.local/share" (or rather, that's the specified default when the environment variable XDG_DATA_HOME isn't explicitly set, and default installations of Ubuntu don't appear to set it) .

- It clashes with the directory naming style on my desktop systems. All directories located directly under $HOME that are not prefixed with a dot are named using Capital Case -- e.g. "Desktop", "Documents", "Pictures" -- a scheme which is consistent with the defaults defined in "/etc/xdg/user-dirs.defaults" from package "xdg-user-dirs". A directory under $HOME having an all-lowercase name introduces an ugly stylistic inconsistency and it complicates the navigation of directories in the shell when tab completion is case-sensitive.

Therefore snap packages should base the value of SNAP_USER_DATA on the value of XDG_DATA_HOME (or its specified default). For the "notes" snap, this would be "$HOME/.local/share/snap/notes/1".

If however the XDG spec is considered irrelevant to snap packages, please consider using a proper UNIX-style dot-prefixed directory, "$HOME/.snap".

[1] http://standards.freedesktop.org/basedir-spec/basedir-spec-latest.html
[2] https://wiki.debian.org/XDGBaseDirectorySpecification