Some people work using a shared home directory on several machines each with different versions of GNOME. Because versions of GNOME can sometimes have conflicting configuration settings, what they might want to do is be able to have different configuration directories for each version.

Thinking about this, it is possible to change where GConf loads its config from (since GConf checks ~/.gconf/path and it is possible to give GConf a path based on an environment variable); and I'm pretty sure that it's possible to set the directory that XDG programs look in (how?); but there doesn't seem to be functional way to set the location of ~/.gnome2.

It turns out that libgnome provides an API call for it: gnome_user_dir_get(), but I didn't know about it, which leads me to suspect that a number of other people didn't know either. I wonder how many apps just hardcode ~/.gnome2? I don't have a full source checkout, otherwise I'd check.

Looking at the implementation of gnome_user_get_dir() (search for libgnome_userdir_setup), it checks the existence of an environment variable GNOME22_USER_DIR, which I think nowadays should be GNOME220_USER_DIR, implying that this feature has effectively been forgotten about.

The question here is should we fix our apps to use this API and start making sure that this API is up todate? With the big drive to abandon libgnome/libgnomeui would we just be wasting our time anyway? What's the way forward?