A friend of mine was trying out xfce and noticed that it doesn't use $HOME when locating the home directory to look for and write its .xfce4/ config files in. He sets his $HOME before running many apps so that config is stored on a local disk rather than in the NFS mounted home directories in our environment.
IIRC, it's on purpose. There is another env var to achieve what you want.
Whats the purpose? it appears that xfce doesn't even make the choice itself. it calls glib's g_get_home_dir() function and joins that with .xfce4 (libxfce4util/util.c). I suppose this could be considered a glib issue (glib 2.3.1 here with xfce 4.3.0.1) but it seems to me that g_get_home_dir() should return the value of $HOME rather than whatever its doing (returning the value from getpwent? returning ~$LOGNAME or ~$USER?). xfce could work around it. its not a big deal to me but i thought i'd point it out.
Theres an environment variable $XFCE4HOME which is used by Xfce applications to determine the path to the users ~/.xfce4/ directory. This defaults to $HOME/.xfce4/ and starting with CVS as of two-three days ago, the startup script sets this environment variable to $HOME/.xfce4/. What version do you use?
can this be closed?
close it. i reported it on 4.3.0.1 but it sounds like its fixed in cvs.
closing