Hi,

for jack-autostart i need to store some data in a per-user file
across the lifetime of the jackd process. It's a pretty typical
tempfile, when the process goes away, it will be considered stale,
when the system is rebooted, it should be discarded. It may exist
once per user.

Since i already use $HOME/.config for configuration data,
which more precisely is the default setting of XDG_CONFIG_HOME
(according to [1]), i would like to consider the pendant
XDG_RUNTIME_DIR for the tempfile i have described.

Unfortunately, the specification [1] does not provide a default
for XDG_RUNTIME_DIR as it does for XDG_CONFIG_HOME.

In Ubuntu, there used to be libpam-xdg-support (see [2]). It
sets up a directory in "/run/user", if neccessary, at login
time of the user. More recently, this task has been assumed by
pam-systemd (see [3]).

Question open for debate:

On a systemd-free system, should an alternative exist which
assumes the task of initializing XDG envvars as described by
[1] in the way done by [3]?

Kind regards,
T.

Links:

[1] freedesktop.org. XDG Base Directory Specification.
URL: http://standards.freedesktop.org/basedir-spec/basedir-spec-latest.html

[2] Ubuntu Launchpad. pam-xdg-support.
URL: https://launchpad.net/pam-xdg-support

[3] freedesktop.org. pam_systemd.
URL: http://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/pam_systemd.html