Should we close bugs that have no people working on them even if they are still valid?

The following bugs are all related to locations of startup configuration files and IMHO are all worth working on at some point

• bug #35392
• bug #36477
• bug #40444

This bug is still actionable. There are a few open bugs all having to do with the location of startup files.

Octave currently kind of follows the gdb model, in that configs are loaded from a system-wide config file, a user config file, and a startup file in the current directory.

This bug is about moving the system-wide startup file to something like $(sysconfdir)/octave/octaverc by default, or maybe allowing it to be configured, as gdb does in its configure script. Right now it defaults to $(datadir)/octave/$(version)/m/startup/octaverc with no easy way to change that. The user can set the OCTAVE_VERSION_INITFILE enviroment variable, and that is documented, but can't be set to something else globally.

But then there is also a site configuration file that is different from the version configuration file. Should both be moved to $(sysconfdir), one or the other, or neither? Or should a startup file in $(sysconfdir) be in addition to the current startup files? Lots of options.

Updating release to dev.

Right, I think that is taken care of by using $(sysconfdir), which will be $(prefix)/etc by default, and most distributions automatically pass --sysconfdir=/etc to configure in their packaging infrastructure. I don't know that we need special logic to change it to /etc when $(prefix) happens to be /usr. Anyone who cares about having only non-modifiable files under /usr ought to be able to pass --sysconfdir=/etc to configure.

Using $(sysconfdir)/octave/octaverc for the site configuration file might be the best way to address this.

This could be changed along with another bug, bug #36477, which is about using XDG_CONFIG_HOME (default=~/.config) for storing user preferences. We already use ~/.config/octave for the experimental GUI qt-settings file. So ~/.config/octave/octaverc could go right alongside that nicely.

It appears that where to put things like startup
configuration files is as unstructured as most things
in Linux, but at least the Fedora preference seems to
be (or is becoming) to use <home dir>.local/share/...

This is for individual users. System-wide stuff goes
here and there, /etc. etc....

/etc/octave seems a good choice.

This can be effectively done with the current version of Octave by building like this:

./configure ...
make \
    startupfiledir='/etc/octave/$(version)/startup' \
    localstartupfiledir='/etc/octave/site/startup'
make install \
    startupfiledir='/etc/octave/$(version)/startup' \
    localstartupfiledir='/etc/octave/site/startup'

Octave will then look for the version and site startup files in those directories.

Is this a valid solution for what you want?