Strawman: move private data directories into projects directory
One thing we've talked about doing is !475 (closed) to make Builder parallel installable for nightly/stable/gtk4. One thing that has always been a problem with that is the duplicated data directories for git checkouts, flatpak SDKs, installations, cache dirs, etc as they consume considerable space.
Another option we could look into is to remove that from the XDG cache dirs and instead move it into the Projects/
directory as configured from GSettings. This would ensure that they could be shared across installations.
Additionally, we could have a second option to specify the build/data dir in case users want to place it on alternate storage (such as an ultra fast SSD just to keep builds fast and separate from the disk for the home directory to save SSD lifetime). Something like a value of '' would mean "just use ~/Projects/.gnome-builder/
". We could even support relative to project paths like "${PROJECT_DIR}/.build" so they user can place builds within the project (albeit that complicates SDKs/etc).
Somewhat related to this, is to cleanup the directory naming we use for projects so they can be shorter and easier to locate. Things like podman have really long names which are frustrating to navigate.
/CC @gwagner