Setting $HOME/Documents/Arduino as systemwide default sketchbook folder

[ysalmon]

I am currently trying to deploy the Arduino IDE to a bunch of Linux machines in a teaching environment. (disclaimer : I am not an Arduino user myself)

I am facing some difficulty with the way the IDE selects the sketchbook folder for a new user. In my tests it is located in ~/Arduino, and this is consistent with my understanding of the corresponding method in the Platform class for Linux.

I suggest it would be interesting to use $(xdg-user-dir DOCUMENTS)/Arduino which by default would be ~/Documents/Arduino. I am not proposing xdg-compliance just for the sake of it : in our concrete working environment with both Windows and Linux workstations, ~/Documents (and what is under it) is mounted to a CIFS network share that is accessible from Windows workstations as well, while ~ and ~/Arduino cannot be.

I tried to tweak the sketchbook.path preference in the global default preferences.txt but it does not seem to support variables like ~/Documents/Arduino or $HOME/Documents/Arduino.

I understand there has already been discussions about xdg directory structure compliance (#3915) and the migration problems a change would cause (https://github.com/arduino/Arduino/issues/7651#issuecomment-393703658).

So my suggestion is to maybe not make this default behaviour but allow for a xdg-compliance preference in the default, global preferences.txt (would be ignored if present in a user's file) that a system administrator could enable. This would make it possible to leave existing installations untouched while progressively adapting things, in a manner consistent with e.g. the linux install script which goes at lengths to use the xdg API.

Different but related : what is the rationale for reverting to the default sketchbook folder when the folder set in the preferences does not exist, instead of creating it (as is done for the default path anyway) ?

[lhanson]

Please comply with users' XDG preferences, there is no reason to be creating yet another junk-drawer directory in a user's $HOME and numerous reasons not to.

[lhanson]

Other conversation on the topic here: https://github.com/arduino/arduino-ide/issues/1514

[ysalmon]

BTW if somebody is facing the same problem as me, here is an ugly workaround pending resolution of this :

after installing arduino IDE on the machine : mv /opt/arduino/arduino /opt/arduino/arduino.real then create an executable shell script /opt/arduino/arduino with content :

#!/bin/bash
mkdir -p $HOME/.arduino15
if [ ! -f $HOME/.arduino15/preferences.txt ]; then
  mkdir -p $(xdg-user-dir DOCUMENTS)/Arduino
  echo "sketchbook.path=$(xdg-user-dir DOCUMENTS)/Arduino" > $HOME/.arduino15/preferences.txt
fi
/opt/arduino/arduino.real $@

On first run by the user, this will create an appropriate default in the preferences.txt file.

[rhysday]

Arduino creates THREE folders in my HOME directory. Even if I create a wrapper and try to change HOME location it doesn't work because it's a java app.