I am not sure if this is a yakuake or a konsole-part bug, but I will describe it here since I only experience the issue in Yakuake (I guess the same will be happening in other applications that use the konsole-part).

In a dropped-down Yakuake window I do a "right click -> Scrollback -> Adjust Scrollback..." and I choose the "Unlimited scrollback" option, where it gives me the following notification:

----
When using this option, the scrollback data will be written unencrypted to temporary files. Those temporary files will be deleted automatically when Konsole is closed in a normal manner.
Use Settings->Configure Konsole->File Location to select the location of the temporary files.
----

Then I open the konsole and I choose "Settings -> Configure Konsole -> File Location -> Use user specific location". I kill and restart yakuake. Now yakuake should save the scrollback files in /home/user/.cache/konsole directory, but the global /tmp is still used instead.

I tried to debug the konsole (not yakuake) code since the konsole-part is involved here, and I found that the choice of path is happening in the History.cpp file issue and in the HistoryFile::HistoryFile() constructor.

I added the following qDebug lines in the code:

HistoryFile::HistoryFile()
    : _fd(-1),
      _length(0),
      _fileMap(0),
      _readWriteBalance(0)
{
    // Determine the temp directory once
    // This class is called 3 times for each "unlimited" scrollback.
    // This has the down-side that users must restart to
    // load changes (currently only 2 choices).

    if (!historyFileLocation.exists()) {
        KConfigGroup configGroup(KSharedConfig::openConfig(), "FileLocation");
        KSharedConfig::Ptr k = KSharedConfig::openConfig();
        qDebug() << "KConfig::mainConfigName() = " << k->name();
        qDebug() << "configGroup.readEntry(\"scrollbackUseCacheLocation\", false) = " << configGroup.readEntry("scrollbackUseCacheLocation", false);
        qDebug() << "configGroup.name() = " << configGroup.name();
        qDebug() << "configGroup.exists() = " << configGroup.exists();
        if (configGroup.readEntry("scrollbackUseCacheLocation", false)) {
            *historyFileLocation() = QStandardPaths::writableLocation(QStandardPaths::CacheLocation);
        } else {
            *historyFileLocation() = QDir::tempPath();
        }
        QDir().mkpath(*historyFileLocation());
    }
    const QString tmpDir = *historyFileLocation();
    const QString tmpFormat = tmpDir + QLatin1Char('/') + "konsole-XXXXXX.history";
    _tmpFile.setFileTemplate(tmpFormat);
    if (_tmpFile.open()) {
        _tmpFile.setAutoRemove(true);
        _fd = _tmpFile.handle();
    }
}

And what I realized is that yakuake doesn't respect the scrollback file location because the config file yakuakerc doesn't contain a config group "FileLocation".

This is a sample debug output for when I run "konsole":
~$ konsole
KConfig::mainConfigName() =  "konsolerc"
configGroup.readEntry("scrollbackUseCacheLocation", false) =  true
configGroup.name() =  "FileLocation"
configGroup.exists() =  true

And this is a sample debug output when I run "yakuake":
~$ yakuake
KConfig::mainConfigName() =  "yakuakerc"
configGroup.readEntry("scrollbackUseCacheLocation", false) =  false
configGroup.name() =  "FileLocation"
configGroup.exists() =  false

What is happening here is that in the line "KConfigGroup configGroup(KSharedConfig::openConfig(), "FileLocation");" the config file is loaded and we try to read the config group "FileLocation". Since there is no filename provided to the function KSharedConfig::openConfig(), the default KConfig::mainConfigName() is used as the configuration file. Eventually, when one uses "konsole" the default configuration file is "konsolerc", that contains the config group "FileLocation", and the scrollback file location works as expected, while when konsole-part is loaded from yakuake the default configuration file is "yakuakerc". Of course, yakuakerc doesn't contain the config group "FileLocation" and the scrollback files are saved to the default /tmp location.

When I added in ~/.config/yakuakerc the following lines (that are the lines added by konsole to the konsolerc when the user chooses the option "Use user specific location" for storing the scrollback files), the problem is solved.

[FileLocation]
scrollbackUseCacheLocation=true
scrollbackUseSystemLocation=false

Reproducible: Always




I would choose the bug severity as "Normal", but I chose "Major" because this bug may lead to privacy/security issues in shared environments.